Itsik Pe'er, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, has joined C2B2. Prof. Pe'er develops and applies novel computational methods in human genetics, answering questions such as: How is it best to measure, describe and quantify differences between individual DNA sequences? How does sequence variation affect biological processes? How can we use it to understand and influence human disease? All these questions pose complex analytical challenges, with direct impact on medical research. Some of Prof. Pe'er's specific interests include the study of genetics in special populations that underwent bottleneck and admixture events, the development of an information processing framework for most people having their genome on a disk, and the interplay between somatic and germline variation. 

Prof. Pe’er is a graduate of Tel Aviv University, where he received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees. He did postdoctoral research at the Department of Molecular genetics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and then jointly at the Broad Institute, Whitehead Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.