Jill P. Mesirov

Jill Mesirov is chief informatics officer of the Broad Institute where she directs the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Organization. She is also adjunct professor of bioinformatics at Boston University.

Jill is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering and business applications. Her current research interest is computational biology with a focus on algorithms and analytic methodologies for pattern recognition and discovery with applications to cancer genomics, genome analysis and interpretation, and comparative genomics. In addition, Jill is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community.

In 1997, Jill came to the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, from IBM, where she was manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization. Before joining IBM in 1995, she was director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation for 10 years. She has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley , the Institute for Defense Analyses' Center for Communications Research in Princeton , and as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society.

Mesirov is a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a member of review committees for the Department of Energy's Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Board of Directors of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB). She has also served as a member of the Biology and Environmental Research Advisory Committee of the Department of Energy, president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, trustee of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, trustee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley , California , and chair of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves on numerous academic and corporate scientific advisory and journal editorial boards.

Jill received her A.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics and Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis University.