UCLA Computational Biologist Named ISCB Fellow

Eran Halperin, UCLA professor of computer science, human genetics, computational medicine and anesthesiology, has been elected as a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, a leading professional organization for computational biology and bioinformatics.

The society announced its 2021 class of fellows on March 2 and recognized Halperin for his “transformative work in the field of computational genomics through novel algorithms and theory that has enabled large-scale studies of genetic variation data.” Halperin is one of 13 new honorees who will be formally introduced at the joint Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference/European Conference on Computational Biology, which will be held virtually in July.

In addition to his faculty appointments at both the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the David Geffin School of Medicine, Halperin is the associate director of informatics at the Institute of Precision Health, the co-director of the Computational Genomics Summer Institute and the director of the AI in Medicine Program of Computational Medicine. He also leads the Big Data Genomics Laboratory, which focuses on the development of computational tools for the analysis of genetic and epigenetic data.

Methods and software programs developed by Halperin’s research group have been used by hundreds of researchers worldwide to better understand the genetic causes of illnesses, such as cardiovascular diseases, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and breast cancer.

Halperin joined UCLA in 2016 from Tel Aviv University in Israel. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles across different disciplines such as human genetics, computational biology and theoretical computer science. He has received various honors for academic achievements, including the Rothschild Fellowship, the Technion-Juludan prize and the Krill Prize.