Professor of Medicine, Division of Medical Genetics;
Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences;
Co-Lead, Structural and Functional Cancer Genomics Research Program, Moores Cancer Center;
UC San Diego, School of Medicine

Jill Mesirov is associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. As associate vice chancellor, Mesirov is responsible for the overarching strategy for computational health sciences and research computing at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She is a member of the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, where she serves as co-lead for the structural and functional genomics research program.

Mesirov is a computational scientist who has spent many years working in the area of high-performance computing on problems that arise in science, engineering, and business applications. Her research focuses on cancer genomics applying machine-learning methods to functional data derived from patient tumors. The lab analyzes this molecular data to determine the underlying biological mechanisms of specific tumor subtypes, to stratify patients according to their relative risks of relapse, and to identify candidate treatments. In addition, Mesirov is committed to the development of practical, accessible software tools to bring these methods to the general biomedical research community. Her tools support over half a million users worldwide.

Before moving to UC San Diego in 2015, Mesirov was associate director and chief informatics officer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, formerly the whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, where she directed the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program and was a member of the Cancer Program steering committee. She previously served as manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in the Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization of IBM, director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation and has also held positions in the mathematics department at the University of California at Berkeley and served as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society.

Mesirov is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) where she formerly served as president. She was appointed as a founding member of Governor Jerry Brown’s California Precision Medicine Advisory Committee. The committee will advise the Governor's Office on all aspects of the state’s new precision medicine initiative and provide recommendations on further actions the public and private sectors can take to integrate precision medicine into health care.

Mesirov received her B.A. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Brandeis University.