Itai Yanai (born 6 February 1975) is an American-Israeli biomedical scientist and Founding Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the

NYU Grossman School of Medicine NYU Grossman School of Medicine is a medical school of New York University, a private research university in New York City. It was founded in 1841 and is one of two medical schools of the university, with the other being the Long Island School o ...

. He is also a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU.

Early life and education

Yanai was born in Haifa, Israel, and moved with his family to Boston in his early teens, when his father

Moshe Yanai Moshe Yanai ( he, משה ינאי; born 1949) is an Israeli electrical engineer. He is an inventor, businessman, entrepreneur, aviator, investor,

was appointed Chief Engineer at EMC. He graduated from

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

in 1998 with degrees in

computer engineering Computer engineering (CoE or CpE) is a branch of electrical engineering and computer science that integrates several fields of computer science and electronic engineering required to develop computer hardware and software. Computer engineers ...

and philosophy, both summa cum laude. In 2002 he became the first person in the nation to receive a Ph.D. in, what was at the time, the fledgling field of

Bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

. After several years at the

Weizmann Institute The Weizmann Institute of Science ( he, מכון ויצמן למדע ''Machon Vaitzman LeMada'') is a public research university in Rehovot, Israel, established in 1934, 14 years before the State of Israel. It differs from other Israeli univ ...

and

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, he returned to Israel in 2008 as a faculty member at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He moved to the United States in 2016, when he assumed his current position.

Research

Yanai has published extensively in bioinformatics and theory. He has also done seminal experimental research in cell biology. In 2016 Yanai co-authored a popular book for the general public.Yanai, I. & Lercher, M. The Society of Genes. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA USA, 2016).

References

1975 births Living people New York University faculty {{Biochemist-stub