Marcia M. Nizzari

Marcia Nizzari is the director of informatics development for the Medical and Population Genetics program at the Broad Institute. In this role, she supervises development of all production informatics software for the Genetics Analysis platform, which includes genotyping platforms, targeted resequencing, and decision support systems for population and disease association studies.

Marcia joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (now the Broad Institute) in 2002 as a software architect for the Production Sequencing Informatics group; she has been director of the Medical and Population Genetics informatics development group since March 2003. Prior to joining Whitehead, she was chief technology officer for a large division of Thomson Financial, where she managed a product development team of 135 designers, engineers, quality assurance and support personnel.

With over 20 years experience in commercial software development, Marcia has been an architect and technical manager for a wide variety of application domains, including process control and manufacturing, software tools, avionics, telephony, and bioinformatics.

Marcia received an M.S. in computer science from Boston University in 1990. She is first inventor on a software patent (US Patent #6014647) on customer interaction tracking. Marcia has also served as chair of the computer chapter of the Central New England Council, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and is currently a member of the Computer Science Advisory Board for Boston University. Her computer science interests include semantic representation, scalable architectures, and adaptive system design.