Nir Friedman

Nir Friedman is a Professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem with dual appointments at The Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering and The Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences.

His research spans three interconnected fields:

• Molecular Biology of Chromatin and Transcriptional Regulation: Understanding cellular transcription regulation, chromatin-transcription interactions, and gene expression mechanisms
• Computational Systems Biology: Applying probabilistic models to analyze high-throughput biological data and understand complex biological systems
• Inference and Learning in Probabilistic Models: Developing methods for representation, inference, and learning with Bayesian networks and Markov networks

Professor Friedman's lab has created significant bioinformatics resources including SEMPHY for phylogenetic reconstruction, ScoreGenes for gene expression analysis, GeneXPress for visualization, and LibB for Bayesian network learning. His interdisciplinary work bridges computer science and molecular biology, with offices in both the Rothberg Building (Computer Science) and Silberman Building (Life Sciences).

He has supervised over 20 graduate students since 2001, mentoring researchers who have gone on to contribute significantly to computational biology. His lab maintains an active blog and continues to develop tools that advance research in systems biology and probabilistic modeling.