Jennifer Listgarten

Jennifer Listgarten is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Department, the Center for Computational Biology, and the Bioengineering program at the University of California, Berkeley. She serves as a member of the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab and holds the Jeffrey Huber and Angel Vossough Chancellor's Chair in Computational Biomedicine. Her multidisciplinary appointments reflect her work at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and biological sciences.

Professor Listgarten completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2007, following undergraduate degrees in Physics and Computer Science from Queen's University in Canada. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she spent a decade (2007-2017) at Microsoft Research with positions in Cambridge, MA, Los Angeles, and Redmond, WA.

Her research focuses on developing and applying machine learning methods to solve problems in biology and medicine, with current emphasis on protein design, optimization, and engineering for properties such as expression, fluorescence, binding, and stability. She also works on computational chemistry methods, drug repositioning, and machine learning methodology at the intersection of graphical models, neural networks, and variational inference. Her earlier work addressed statistical genetics methods for correcting confounding factors in GWAS, epigenome-WAS, and eQTL studies, as well as immunoinformatics problems including HLA class I epitope prediction.

Her recent publications demonstrate a strong trajectory in applying machine learning to protein engineering, with numerous high-impact papers in Nature Biotechnology, Science Advances, and top machine learning conferences. Her work shows increasing integration of computational methods with experimental validation, particularly in CRISPR technology and protein design applications.

• Bakar Fellows Spark Award (2024)

Professor Listgarten actively mentors PhD students through EECS, the Center for Computational Biology, and Bioengineering programs. She maintains scientific advisory roles with several biotechnology companies including Dayzero Diagnostics, Deep Apple Therapeutics, Inscripta, and Fable Therapeutics (where she serves as Academic co-founder). Her research group collaborates with prominent scientists including Chris Garcia (Stanford), Phil Romero (U Wisconsin), David Savage (UC Berkeley), and David Schaffer (UC Berkeley).

The Listgarten lab operates within the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) and the Center for Computational Biology (CCB), focusing on developing computational methods that enable new biological insights and therapeutic applications, particularly in the areas of protein engineering and CRISPR technology.