Russell Schwartz

Russell Schwartz is Professor of Biological Sciences and Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and Machine Learning. He serves as Head of the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department and Co-Director of the Joint CMU-University of Pittsburgh PhD Program in Computational Biology.

His research develops computational models for complex biological systems, focusing on cancer genomics and macromolecular assembly. Key areas include reconstructing tumor clonal evolution through integration of bulk and single-cell sequencing data, developing algorithms for stochastic simulation of self-assembly systems, and creating optimization methods for fitting models to experimental data.

Recent publications demonstrate advancements in single-cell lineage tracing, circulating tumor DNA analysis, and generative AI for biological databases. His team's BrM-Phylo software enables phylogeny reconstruction from matched transcriptome data in breast cancer brain metastases.

• NSF CAREER Award
• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship

Schwartz leads multiple NIH-funded projects on tumor evolution modeling and mentors students in computational cancer research. His laboratory develops open-source tools including FISHtrees for tumor phylogenetics and TUSV for integrating structural variants in clonal reconstruction.