Naim Matasci, PhD

Naim Matasci is the Senior Director, Applied AI Research at the Ellison Medical Institute and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. At the Ellison Medical Institute, he oversees and leads computational and data intensive projects and spearheads the application of modern Artificial Intelligence to research questions in the cancer space and beyond.

Dr. Matasci holds a M.Sc. in Molecular Biology with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and a Ph.D. in Biology from the IMPRS Leipzig School of Human Origins/Leipzig University (Germany), received for his work on primate protein evolution performed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology under the direction of Svante Pääbo.

After completing his Ph.D., he moved to the United States and joined the iPlant Collaborative (later CyVerse), a National Science Foundation initiative to develop a national-scale data management and analysis and infrastructure for the life sciences where he held the position of Scientific Lead and Communications Director. Concurrently, he was appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of the University of Arizona.

He is a member of multiple national organizations including the American Association for Cancer Research and the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution and served on the DataWorks! Advisory Committee and the Generative AI Task Force of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

His portfolio of projects at the Ellison Medical Institute includes using AI to better diagnose and identify treatment opportunities from microscopy images of tumor, exploring the human genome to monitor the body’s ability to cope with mutations and environmental stress and novel approaches to aggregate and process large amount of clinical data to identify correlations between a person’s clinical history and their risk of developing certain diseases. He also supports the bioinformatic and computational analysis needs of the Institute’s researchers across their projects.