Lior Pachter

Lior Pachter is the Bren Professor of Computational Biology and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a position he has held since 2017. Previously, he served at the University of California, Berkeley from 1999 to 2018, progressing through roles including Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor in the departments of Mathematics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, and Computer Science. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Caltech (1994) and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT (1999).

His research focuses on computational methods for genomics, including functional genomics, single-cell sequencing, and algorithm development for analyzing high-throughput data. Key areas include RNA biology, chromatin interactions, and the integration of multi-omics datasets. Pachter’s lab develops tools like kallisto and bustools for RNA-seq quantification, emphasizing open-source software and reproducibility.

Notable awards include the NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and Miller Professorship. He has authored over 100 papers, with recent work addressing viral detection at single-cell resolution, biophysical modeling of gene expression, and transcriptome quantification. Teaching spans courses in computational biology, mathematics, and machine learning at both Caltech and UC Berkeley.

His lab’s interdisciplinary collaborations span biochemistry, statistics, and computer science, aiming to bridge experimental and computational approaches in genomics. Current projects include the Commons Cell Atlas and viral sequence discovery using novel sequencing techniques.