Mikhail Gelfand, Skoltech professor of bioinformatics, has been elected as a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology Inc. (ISCB), a leading professional organization for computational biology and bioinformatics. 

The society announced its first member of the Class of 2022 of fellows on March 14 and recognized Gelfand for his “pioneering contributions to bioinformatics research on an international scale, most recently in the area of comparative genomics.” 

Since its founding in 1997, the ISCB has emerged as the leading professional society for participants in computational biology and bioinformatics. Society membership reflects a commitment toward the advancement of computational biology.

Dr. Gelfand is a leading pioneer and a well-established bioinformatics specialist in the international scientific community. His research encompasses comparative genomics, systems biology, molecular evolution, transcriptomics, and metagenomics. Gelfand was the first to predict the existence of riboswitches, regulatory RNA structures that change conformation after binding by small molecules (Gelfand et al., Trends Genet. 1999). He also showed that a bacterial ribosome may act as a zinc depot (Panina et al., PNAS 2003) and how TFs find their binding sites in the cell (Kolesov et al, PNAS 2007). Recently, he worked on the analysis of genome rearrangements (Moldovan & Gelfand, Front. Microbiol. 2019) and showed that younger pathogens have an increased level of genome rearrangement (Bochkareva et al., PeerJ 2018).

Besides his research at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, he heads the laboratory at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems.

The announcement says “without argument, Dr. Mikhail Gelfand embodies the principles of the ISCB Fellow designation, demonstrating excellence in computational biology research and service to the computational biology community”.

Contact information:
Skoltech Communications
+7 (495) 280 14 81