October 2022: Prof. Elhanan Borenstein is the new head of the Edmond J. Safra Center

Prof. Borenstein is a Full Professor at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and at the Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. He is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and an affiliate professor at the department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. Prof. Borenstein received his BSc in physics and computer science and his PhD in computer science from Tel-Aviv University, and held a joint postdoctoral position at Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute. In 2010, he joined the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington as a faculty member, and in 2018, moved to Tel Aviv University with a joint appointment in Medicine and in Computer Science. Prof. Borenstein is the recipient of various prestigious awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the NIH New Innovator Award.

Prof. Borenstein’s research focuses on the computational study of the human microbiome, spearheading research in microbiome systems biology. His group develops novel computational methods inspired by data science machine learning, metabolic modeling, and network theory to model the microbiome and to analyze high-dimensional metagenomic and multi-omic microbiome data. His research ultimately aims to provide a systems-based understanding of the microbiome in health and in disease and to inform microbiome-based therapy.

Prof. Elhanan Borenstein is the new head of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics starting October 2022. Prof. Borenstein replaced Prof. Ron Shamir, who was the Center's head over the past 17 years.