Dana Pe’er

Dana Pe’er, Ph.D., is Chair of the Computational and Systems Biology Program, Alan and Sandra Gerry endowed chair and Scientific Director of the Alan and Sandra Gerry Metastasis and Tumor Ecosystems Center at the Sloan Kettering Institute and has been selected as an HHMI investigator.

Dr. Pe’er’s lab develops novel computational techniques to characterize gene regulation at the single-cell level, in the context of complex tissues such as the tumor microenvironment. Recent work has focused upon the characterization of cell types, their organization along developmental trajectories, and the delineation of regulatory circuits that control cellular identity and behavior. Research questions include how diverse cell types evolve or act in a coordinated fashion within a tissue, particularly in the context of tumor immune ecosystems. The Pe’er lab is also developing analytical tools for new imaging-based technologies that combine high-resolution molecular profiling with spatial information.

Dr. Pe’er received her Bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and her PhD in computer science with Dr. Nir Friedman, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Harvard University, she trained as a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of genetics in the lab of Dr. George Church. Dr. Pe’er has received numerous honors, including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, an NSF CAREER award, an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, the ISCB Overton Prize and MD Anderson’s Ernst W. Bertner Memorial Award . She currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Cell, leads a Center within the NCI Human Tumor Atlas Network, and sits on the organizing committee of the Human Cell Atlas project, heading the computational analysis for this project.