Jill P. Mesirov

Timeline

1. 1974

   A Brandeis doctorate in mathematics

   She earns a BA in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, then an MA and a PhD in mathematics at Brandeis University. Her doctorate, supervised by Richard Palais, comes in 1974.

2. 1989–1996

   President of the AWM

   She serves as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1989 to 1991. In 1996, she becomes a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

3. By 1997

   Thinking Machines and IBM

   Before 1997, she holds posts in the mathematics department at UC Berkeley and at the Institute for Defense Analyses, where she conducts work in cryptology and speech. She also serves as associate executive director of the American Mathematical Society, director of research at Thinking Machines Corporation, and manager of computational biology and bioinformatics in IBM's Healthcare/Pharmaceutical Solutions Organization.

4. 1997–2015

   Whitehead and the Broad Institute

   She joins the Whitehead Institute of MIT in 1997, which later becomes part of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. At the Broad, she serves as associate director and chief informatics officer and directs the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program until she leaves for UC San Diego in 2015.

5. 2005–2011

   GSEA and the Integrative Genomics Viewer

   In 2005, she coauthors the PNAS paper introducing Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) with Aravind Subramanian, Pablo Tamayo, Eric Lander and others; the method reads gene expression data through sets of genes that share biological function and comes as a freely available software package. In 2011, she publishes the Integrative Genomics Viewer in Nature Biotechnology with James T. Robinson, Helga Thorvaldsdóttir, Gad Getz and colleagues.

6. 2012

   ISCB and AMS fellowships

   The International Society for Computational Biology names her to its Fellows Class of 2012. In 2012, she also becomes one of the inaugural fellows of the American Mathematical Society.

7. 2015–2026

   Associate vice chancellor at UC San Diego

   In June 2015, UC San Diego appoints her associate vice chancellor for computational health sciences and professor of medicine at the School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. Her group applies machine-learning methods to functional genomics data in cancer and infectious disease, and in October 2015 the Department of Computer Science and Engineering names her a faculty affiliate.

8. Since July 2026

   Senior vice president at Sanford Burnham Prebys

   She joins Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in July 2026 as a Distinguished Professor and Senior Vice President for Computational Science. Her duties include shaping computational science strategy and advancing the rapid development and use of artificial intelligence, and she is a member of the institute's Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.