Raluca Gordan

Raluca Gordan is a Professor at the UMass Chan Medical School, affiliated with the T.H. Chan School of Medicine and the Morningside Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. Her research sits at the intersection of genomics, computational biology, and systems biology, with a focus on transcription factor-DNA interactions, epigenetic regulation, and the impact of genomic variation on biological function.

• Education:
  • B.S. in Computer Science from Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Romania
  • M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University, USA

Gordan’s work explores how transcription factors recognize DNA sequences, the role of DNA shape in binding specificity, and the consequences of environmental stressors like UV and UVC radiation on mutagenesis and repair. Her research extends to cancer genomics, where she investigates how mutations affect transcription factor binding, and to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, where chromatin accessibility reveals sex-dependent glial changes.

Her publications span high-impact journals such as Nature, Science, and Nucleic Acids Research, with key themes including:

• Protein-DNA binding mechanisms
• Epigenetic modulation of DNA repair
• Computational modeling of regulatory elements
• Transcriptional network dynamics

She collaborates broadly across genomics, systems biology, and biomedical engineering, with applications in cancer, malaria, and mitochondrial DNA damage sensing.