Distinguished Professor and Senior Vice President for Computational Science
Sanford Burnham Prebys Discovery Institute

Jill 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 a million users worldwide.

Mesirov joined Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in July of 2026 as Distinguished Professor, Senior Vice President for Computational Science, and a member of the Sanford Burnham Prebys NCI-Designated Cancer Center. As Senior Vice President, she works with Institute leadership to develop overall computational science strategies, coordinating projects among the Institute’s four disease-specific centers and two technology-enabling centers and advancing overall progress and implementation of computational sciences, including the rapid development and use of artificial intelligence.

Prior to joining Sanford Burnham Prebys, Jill Mesirov was Associate Vice Chancellor for Computational Health Sciences and Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine. As Associate Vice Chancellor, Mesirov was responsible for the overarching strategy for computational health sciences and research computing at UC San Diego School of Medicine. She was also a member of the UCSD Moores Cancer Center, where she served as co-lead for the structural and functional genomics research program.

Before moving to 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. Her awards include the Children’s Brain Tumor Network Open Science Award and the WTA Women Breaking Barriers Award.

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.