Rachel Karchin

Rachel Karchin is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in Oncology (School of Medicine) and Computer Science (Whiting School). She leads the Karchin Lab, focusing on computational cancer genomics and immuno-oncology. Her work includes developing algorithms like CHASM and OpenCRAVAT for variant interpretation, and neoantigen prediction models such as BigMHC. She holds affiliations with the Institute for Computational Medicine, Translational Tissue Engineering Center, and the Cancer Cell Map Initiative.

• Education: BS in Computer Engineering (UC Santa Cruz, 1998), MS/PhD in Computer Science (UC Santa Cruz, 2000/2003), Postdoc at UCSF.
• Affiliations: Core member of Institute for Computational Medicine; member of TCGA PanCan Atlas Working Group and Break Through Cancer’s T Cell Repertoire Profiling team.

Her research integrates computational methods with cancer biology to advance precision medicine, tumor evolution modeling, and immune system interactions. Awards include AIMBE (2017) and ISCB (2025) Fellowships, and the William R. Brody Faculty Scholar title (2013–2019).