Justin Kinney

Justin Kinney is an Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Interim Chair of the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology. His research combines mathematical theory, machine learning, and experiments to study gene regulation mechanisms.

Research Focus: The Kinney Lab develops DNA sequencing tools to dissect biophysical mechanisms of gene regulation, with applications in bacterial transcriptional regulation and alternative mRNA splicing in humans. This work has implications for understanding diseases like Spinal Muscular Atrophy and Cancer.

Key Methods: Massively Parallel Reporter Assays (MPRAs), information theory approaches, and machine learning algorithms for analyzing multiplex assays of variant effect (MAVEs).

Education:

• Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University
• B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Cornell University

Publication Trends: Recent work focuses on developing interpretable machine learning models for genomic data, biophysical modeling of sequence-function relationships, and mechanistic studies of splice-modifying drugs. Articles demonstrate strong cross-disciplinary integration of physics, computational biology, and molecular genetics.