Joel Bader, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science, will begin serving as the interim director of both the Institute for Computational Medicine and the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare on July 1, 2021.

A leader in systems biology of human disease, computational biology, and synthetic biology, Bader’s research focuses on genomics and biotechnology and the connection between genotype and phenotype, relating organisms’ genetic material to their observable characteristics. Using engineering-based mathematical, computational, and high-throughput methods, he explores how inborn genetic variants and acquired mutations lead to diseases, such as complex genetic disorders and cancer, with the goal of identifying new therapeutic targets.