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Manolis Kellis (Greek: Μανώλης Καμβυσέλλης; born 1977) is a professor of Computer Science and Computational Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.[3] He is the head of the Computational Biology Group at MIT[4] and is a Principal Investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT.[5]

Key Information

Kellis is known for his contributions to genomics, human genetics, epigenomics, gene regulation, genome evolution, disease mechanism, and single-cell genomics. He co-led the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Project[6] effort to create a comprehensive map of the human epigenome,[5][7][8] the comparative analysis of 29 mammals to create a comprehensive map of conserved elements in the human genome,[9] the ENCODE, GENCODE, and modENCODE projects to characterize the genes, non-coding elements, and circuits of the human genome and model organisms.[10][11][12] A major focus of his work is understanding the effects of genetic variations on human disease,[13] with contributions to obesity,[14][15][16] diabetes,[17] Alzheimer's disease,[18][19][20] schizophrenia,[21] and cancer.[22]

Education and early career

[edit]

Kellis was born in Greece, moved with his family to France when he was 12, and came to the U.S. in 1993.[23] He obtained his PhD from MIT, where he worked with Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute, and Bonnie Berger, professor at MIT[24] and received the Sprowls award for the best doctorate thesis in Computer Science,[25] and the first Paris Kanellakis graduate fellowship.[26] Prior to computational biology, he worked on artificial intelligence, sketch and image recognition, robotics, and computational geometry, at MIT and at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.[24]

Research and career

[edit]

As of April 2025, Manolis Kellis has authored 250 journal publications[27] that have been cited 190,000 times.[1] He has helped direct several large-scale genomics projects, including the Roadmap Epigenomics project,[28][29] the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project,[30] the Genotype Tissue-Expression (GTEx) project.[13]

Comparative genomics

[edit]

Kellis started comparing the genomes of yeast species as an MIT graduate student. As part of this work, which was published in Nature in 2003,[12] he developed computational methods to pinpoint patterns of similarity and difference between closely related genomes. The goal was to develop methods for understanding genomes with a view to apply them to the human genome.

He turned from yeast to flies and ultimately to mammals, comparing multiple species to explore genes, their control elements, and their deregulation in human disease.[31] Kellis led several comparative genomics projects in human,[31] mammals,[32][9] flies,[33][34] and yeast.[35]

Epigenomics

[edit]

Kellis co-led the NIH government-funded project to catalogue the human epigenome. He said during an interview with MIT Technology Review[31] "If the genome is the book of life, the epigenome is the complete set of annotations and bookmarks."[31] His lab now uses this map to further the understanding of fundamental processes and disease in humans.

Obesity

[edit]

Kellis and colleagues used epigenomic data to investigate the mechanistic basis of the strongest genetic association with obesity, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.[14] They showed that this mechanism operates in the fat cells of both humans and mice and detailed how changes within the relevant genomic regions cause a shift from dissipating energy as heat (thermogenesis) to storing energy as fat.[16] A full understanding of the phenomenon may lead to treatments for people whose 'slow metabolism' cause them to gain excessive weight.[15]

Alzheimer's disease

[edit]

Kellis, Li-Huei Tsai, and others at MIT used epigenomic markings in human and mouse brains to study the mechanisms leading to Alzheimer's disease, published in Nature in 2015.[18] They showed that immune cell activation and inflammation, which have long been associated with the condition, are not simply the result of neurodegeneration, as some researchers have argued. Rather, in mice engineered to develop Alzheimer's-like symptoms, they found that immune cells start to change even before neural changes are observed.[19]

Single-cell Genomics

[edit]

The Kellis Lab has profiled a large number of human post-mortem brains at single-cell resolution, studying inter-individual variation associated with genetic differences and disease phenotypes, including the first single-cell transcriptomic analysis of Alzheimer's disease (Nature, 2019).

Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx)

[edit]

Kellis is a member of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project that seeks to elucidate the basis of disease predisposition. It is an NIH-sponsored project that seeks to characterize genetic variation in human tissues with roles in diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.[13]

Kellis is also a Principal Investigator of the enhancing GTEx (eGTEx) consortium, studying epigenomic changes of regulatory elements and epitranscriptomic changes of RNA transcripts across multiple human tissues.[36]

Disease Mechanism

[edit]

To date, his lab has developed specific domain expertise in obesity,[15] diabetes,[17] Alzheimer's disease,[18] schizophrenia,[21] heart disease,[37] ALS and FTLD,[38] and cancer.[22]

Teaching

[edit]

In addition to his research, Kellis co-taught for several years MIT's required undergraduate introductory algorithm courses 6.006: Introduction to Algorithms and 6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms[39][40] with Profs. Ron Rivest, Erik Demaine, Piotr Indyk, Srinivas Devadas and others.

He is also teaching a computational biology course at MIT, titled "Computational Biology: Genomes, Networks, Evolution."[41] The course (6.047/6.878) is geared towards advanced undergraduate and early graduate students, seeking to learn the algorithmic and machine learning foundations of computational biology, and also be exposed to current frontiers of research in order to become active practitioners of the field.[42] He started 6.881: Computational Personal Genomics: Making sense of complete genomes, and 6.883/9.S99: Neurogenomics: Computational Molecular Neuroscience This course is aimed at exploring the computational challenges associated with interpreting how sequence differences between individuals lead to phenotypic differences such as gene expression, disease predisposition, or response to treatment.[43]

Awards and honors

[edit]

Kellis received the US Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE),[44] the National Science Foundation CAREER award,[45] a Sloan Research Fellowship,[46] the Gregor Mendel Medal for Outstanding Achievements in Science by the Mendel Lectures committee, the Athens Information Technology (AIT) Niki Award for Science and Engineering,[47] the Ruth and Joel Spira Teaching award,[48] and the George M. Sprowls Award for the best Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science at MIT.[25] He was named as one of Technology Review's Top 35 Innovators Under 35 for his research in comparative genomics[49]

Media appearances

[edit]
  • Decoding A Genomic Revolution, TEDx Cambridge, 2013 "MIT Computational Biologist Manolis Kellis gives us a glimpse of the doctor's office visit of the future, and uses his own genetic mutations to show us how a revolution in genomics is unlocking treatments that could transform medicine as we know it"[50]
  • Regulatory Genomics and Epigenomics of Complex Disease, Welcome Trust, 2014 "Manolis Kellis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, gives one of the keynote lectures at Epigenomics of Common Diseases, (28-31 October 2014), organised by the Wellcome Genome Campus Advanced Courses and Scientific Conferences team at Churchill College, Cambridge[51]
  • Manolis Kellis Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), Reddit Science AMA Series: "I'm Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science at MIT studying the human genome to learn about what causes obesity, Alzheimer's, cancer and other conditions. AMA about comp-bio and epigenomics, and how they impact human health".

References

[edit]
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Manolis Kellis

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Manolis Kellis is a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), head of the MIT Computational Biology Group, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, renowned for his pioneering work in , , gene regulation, and the genomic basis of human diseases such as cancer, , and neurodegenerative disorders. Born in , , in 1977, Kellis moved to France at age 12 and to the at 16, eventually earning his B.S., M.Eng., and Ph.D. in from MIT in 1999 and 2003, respectively, where his doctoral thesis on received the Sprowls Award for the best Ph.D. thesis and the inaugural Paris Kanellakis Graduate Fellowship. Early in his career, he contributed to AI, , and at MIT and PARC before shifting to , developing algorithms to align yeast genomes and identify evolutionary signatures of functional genomic elements, which were published in . Kellis's research has advanced the interpretation of , signatures for regulatory regions, and the role of genetic variants in disease, including leadership in major consortia such as modENCODE for model organisms and significant contributions to the project for mapping functional elements in the , as well as the NIH Epigenome Roadmap. His lab integrates , , and large-scale experimental data to uncover gene-regulatory circuitry and epigenomic annotations, enabling insights into disease mechanisms and precision medicine. Among his numerous accolades, Kellis received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2010, the NSF CAREER Award in 2007, the Research Fellowship in 2008, the NIH Director's Pioneer Award in 2021, the Mendel Medal for genetics research in 2019, and the Niki Award in 2011 for contributions to research; he was also named one of MIT Technology Review's TR35 Top Innovators Under 35 in 2006. At MIT, he holds the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Chair.

Early Life and Education

Early Life

Manolis Kellis was born in March 1977 in , . He grew up in central , where his family's home offered a view of the . As the youngest of three children—following siblings Maria and Panayiotis—Kellis followed the standard Greek curriculum until age 12, developing early proficiency in and science during his schooling. In 1989, Kellis's family relocated to Aix-en-Provence, , where he adapted to the French educational system and quickly learned the language. This period of linguistic immersion, bridging Greek, French, and later English, fostered his fascination with evolutionary patterns, as he noticed shared roots and structures across languages, laying the groundwork for an interest in . He continued excelling in math and science while attending a French-speaking high school. At age 16, in 1993, Kellis immigrated to the with his family, settling in New York and enrolling at the , where he completed his and earned the French Baccalauréat with the Congratulations of the Jury, the highest distinction, in 1995; he also won first prize in a nationwide math competition in South France in 1993. This transition required further adaptation to a new cultural and educational environment, including mastering English proficiency, which he achieved rapidly alongside his siblings. During his high school years, Kellis pursued hobbies such as , , and , while his academic strengths in quantitative subjects began to intersect with emerging curiosities in and through school projects and self-directed exploration.

Education

Manolis Kellis earned his in from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June 1999. During his undergraduate studies, he participated in internships at Xerox PARC, contributing to projects in and modular . He continued at MIT, completing a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and in June 1999, with a thesis titled "Imagina: A Cognitive Abstract Approach to Sketch-Based ," which explored techniques for content-based image analysis. Kellis received his PhD in from MIT in 2003, co-supervised by and . His doctoral thesis, "Computational Comparative Genomics: Genes, Regulation, ," developed methods for analyzing gene regulation and in genomes, employing hidden Markov models among other statistical techniques for motif discovery and annotation. During his graduate studies, Kellis was awarded the first annual Paris Kanellakis Graduate Fellowship in 2000 and the MIT Sprowls Award for the best PhD thesis in Computer Science in 2003.

Professional Career

Academic Positions

Manolis Kellis began his academic career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard from 2003 to 2004, where he contributed to early genome sequencing projects. In 2004, Kellis joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an in the Department of and (EECS). He was promoted to without tenure in 2008 and received tenure as in 2011. Kellis advanced to full in 2014, and as of 2025, he holds the position of of in the MIT Department of and , with a focus on . Since 2004, Kellis has been a member of the MIT Computer Science and Laboratory (CSAIL) and an Associate Member of Institute of MIT and Harvard. He has served as Head of the MIT Group within CSAIL since its inception in 2004. Additionally, Kellis is an affiliate faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

Teaching and Mentorship

Kellis has developed and taught a range of influential courses at MIT, spanning undergraduate and graduate levels in algorithms and . Among these are the graduate course 6.047/6.878 , focusing on algorithmic approaches to biological data analysis; 6.881 , exploring the interpretation of genomic sequences; and 6.871/9.S99 , applying techniques to biomedical challenges. His teaching extends to open educational resources through , where materials from his courses—such as lecture slides, readings, and projects for 6.096 Algorithms for Computational Biology and 6.047 —are freely accessible and utilized by learners worldwide to advance understanding of genomic and evolutionary algorithms. Kellis has provided extensive mentorship, supervising over 50 PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the MIT Computational Biology Group. Many of these trainees have progressed to prominent academic roles, including faculty positions at leading institutions such as Anshul Kundaje as at , Jason Ernst as Professor at UCLA, and Ferhat Ay as at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology.

Research Contributions

Comparative Genomics

Manolis Kellis made early contributions to through the development of algorithms for aligning and annotating yeast genomes. In 2003, he co-led the sequencing and comparative analysis of three species—S. paradoxus, S. mikatae, and S. bayanus—alongside S. cerevisiae, enabling a major revision to the yeast catalogue, affecting approximately 15% of all , identifying 188 new small encoding proteins under 100 , and reducing the total count in S. cerevisiae by about 500 (10%). This work refined structures using conservation, demonstrating the power of multi-species alignments for annotation. Kellis advanced methodological innovations in this domain, including the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) for motif discovery and phylogenetic footprinting to predict functional DNA regions. HMMs were employed to model sequence conservation across species, enumerating short motif cores and extending them iteratively based on evolutionary patterns, which uncovered 72 conserved motifs in yeast intergenic regions, including 28 known regulatory elements and 25 novel ones enriched in functional gene groups. Phylogenetic footprinting complemented this by systematically analyzing genome-wide conservation to distinguish regulatory elements from neutral sequences, validating predictions against experimental data and establishing a framework for identifying noncoding functional sites without prior functional annotations. Building on these foundations, Kellis led a landmark comparative study of 29 eutherian genomes in 2011, generating a high-resolution map of evolutionary constraint across the . This analysis identified over 3.5 million constrained elements covering about 4.2% of the genome, including conserved regulatory regions outside protein-coding areas, and quantified substitution rates to reveal varying evolutionary pressures on different functional classes. The findings confirmed that at least 5.5% of the undergoes purifying selection, providing a refined view of conserved . These contributions established core principles for leveraging evolutionary conservation to prioritize disease-associated variants, as constrained regions showed significant overlap with noncoding variants linked to human traits and disorders, guiding subsequent genomic interpretation efforts. Applications of these methods have extended briefly to epigenomic mapping for enhanced functional annotation.

Epigenomics and Regulatory Networks

Manolis Kellis co-led the integrative analysis efforts in the NIH Roadmap Epigenomics Project from 2008 to 2015, which generated comprehensive epigenomic maps across 111 reference human cell types and tissues using chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) for key histone modifications such as H3K4me1, , H3K27ac, , H3K36me3, and H3K9me3. This mapping revealed distinct regulatory elements, including approximately 2.3 million enhancers and 80,000 promoters, with coordinated changes in histone marks highlighting developmental transitions, such as enhancer activation during heart muscle differentiation from embryonic stem cells to ventricular tissue. The project established a public resource integrating these data with DNA accessibility and methylation profiles, enabling the annotation of functional noncoding elements across diverse cellular contexts. A cornerstone of Kellis's research is the development of ChromHMM, a software tool co-created with Jason Ernst in 2012 for of states from multiple epigenetic datasets. ChromHMM employs a multivariate to segment the into 15-25 distinct states per cell type based on combinatorial patterns of marks and other features, such as active promoters (enriched for and H3K27ac), repressed regions (marked by or ), and putative enhancers. Applied to Roadmap data, ChromHMM facilitated the identification of tissue-specific signatures and their associations with regulatory functions, providing a standardized framework for annotation that has been widely adopted in epigenomic studies. Kellis has advanced regulatory network inference through algorithms that reconstruct gene circuits by integrating profiles with binding and epigenetic data, with applications in both and systems. In , his group developed computational methods to infer cis-regulatory modules by combining comparative sequence alignments across with expression data, revealing conserved and evolvable regulatory programs for processes like ribosomal biogenesis. For models, Kellis contributed to the construction of 394 tissue-specific gene regulatory networks, each delineating genome-wide connections between approximately 20,000 promoters and over 1.8 million enhancers using integrated and Roadmap datasets. These networks highlight modular perturbations in disease contexts and build on enhancer-promoter interaction predictions from the 2012 integrative analysis, which mapped over 127,000 such interactions via chromatin interaction assays.

Disease Genetics and Mechanisms

Manolis Kellis has advanced the understanding of disease genetics by integrating genome-wide association studies (GWAS) with epigenomic and regulatory data to uncover molecular mechanisms underlying complex . His approaches emphasize Bayesian fine-mapping to identify credible causal variants and analyses to link GWAS signals with cell-type-specific regulatory elements, such as enhancers and promoters, thereby inferring and prioritizing target genes. These methods leverage large-scale epigenomic maps to dissect how noncoding genetic variants disrupt regulatory networks, providing insights into pathogenesis beyond mere statistical associations. In research, Kellis's group elucidated the functional mechanism of the strongest known genetic risk locus in the FTO region. Through integrative analysis of conformation and epigenomic profiles in , they demonstrated that the -associated disrupts a long-range enhancer that represses the IRX3 and IRX5 transcription factors, leading to reduced mitochondrial and increased lipid storage in adipocyte precursor cells. This tissue-autonomous regulatory circuitry explains how the promotes without altering FTO expression itself, highlighting enhancer hijacking as a key mechanism. For (AD), Kellis applied epigenomic integration to map cell-type-specific risk variants and prioritize causal genes. Using single-nucleus across brain regions, his team identified 9,628 cell-type-specific ATAC-QTL loci enriched in AD risk loci, particularly in microglial enhancers bound by transcription factors like SPI1 and RUNX1. Colocalization with GWAS signals implicated genes such as APOE and novel candidates in immune dysregulation and amyloid processing, revealing epigenomic erosion in disease progression and linking variants to glial-state transitions. In a 2025 follow-up, the team generated single-nucleus , , and multiome datasets from six brain regions in aged and AD individuals, mapping epigenomic rewiring and dynamic regulatory circuits driving progression in vulnerable cell types. Kellis's work extends to other diseases, including , where heritability partitioning analyses showed that regulatory variants in brain cell types account for a substantial portion of genetic , with enrichment in neuronal and synaptic enhancers. In , colocalization of islet epigenomic data with GWAS loci revealed enhancer-mediated regulation of genes like SIX2 and , disrupting beta-cell function and insulin secretion. For cancer, pan-cancer analyses of whole-genome sequencing data identified recurrent noncoding drivers, such as mutations in TERT promoters and super-enhancers, converging on oncogenic pathways across tumor types. These studies collectively underscore the role of regulatory disruptions in disease, informing precision medicine strategies.

Major Projects and Collaborations

ENCODE and Roadmap Epigenomics

Manolis Kellis has played a pivotal leadership role in the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, launched in 2003 to systematically identify functional elements in the human genome. As a principal investigator and co-leader of the ENCODE Data Analysis Center (EDAC), Kellis has contributed to all major phases of the project, including Phases 1 through 3, by integrating diverse datasets and supporting the Analysis Working Group in developing standardized computational pipelines for data processing and comparison across experiments. These efforts have facilitated the production of over 1,000 datasets focused on transcription factor binding and RNA expression, enabling high-resolution mapping of regulatory regions through techniques such as ChIP-seq and RNA-seq. Key outputs from Kellis's involvement in ENCODE include genome-wide maps of regulatory elements, as detailed in the project's Phase 1 integrative analysis, which identified approximately 2.89 million DNase I hypersensitive sites and 636,336 binding regions across multiple s, covering about 8.1% of the . These maps, combined with assays of structure and histone modifications in over 46 s, have revealed biochemical signatures characteristic of distinct s, such as promoter and enhancer states defined by a 7-state segmentation model. By standardizing pipelines, ENCODE under Kellis's analytical has allowed for reproducible identification of functional elements, with biochemical activity detected across 80.4% of the in at least one . In parallel, Kellis co-led the computational analysis for the NIH Roadmap Mapping Consortium (2008–2015), which generated reference epigenomes for 111 diverse human tissues and cell types to elucidate epigenetic regulation. This initiative processed 2,805 genome-wide datasets uniformly using innovative pipelines for ChIP-seq, DNase-seq, and , including imputation methods to expand coverage to 4,315 datasets and a 25-state segmentation model to annotate regulatory elements. The resulting maps identified over 3.5 million DNase-enriched regions and clustered epigenomes into modules of co-regulated enhancers, enabling cross-tissue comparisons of regulatory networks. These standardized approaches have supported extensions to disease studies by linking epigenetic variants to regulatory disruptions.

GTEx and Single-Cell Genomics

Manolis Kellis has served as analysis co-chair for the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Consortium since its inception in 2010, leading efforts to map genetic variants associated with differences across human tissues. The consortium's work, under Kellis's analytical leadership, generated comprehensive expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) maps from sequencing data across 49 tissues derived from 838 postmortem donors, revealing tissue-specific regulatory effects of over 12 million genetic variants on nearby . These maps, first detailed in a landmark analysis of 7,051 samples from 449 donors, demonstrated that genetic effects on splicing and expression vary substantially by tissue, with tissues showing particularly high specificity for neuronal regulation. The GTEx v8 release in 2020 expanded this resource, identifying 4,278,636 cis-eQTLs and enabling prioritization of disease-associated variants through with genome-wide association studies. Building on GTEx's tissue-level insights, Kellis pioneered single-cell genomics approaches to resolve cellular heterogeneity in brain disorders, starting with the first large-scale single-nucleus sequencing (snRNA-seq) study of (AD) brains in 2019. This analysis profiled 80,660 nuclei from the (Brodmann area 10) across 48 individuals, uncovering disease-associated transcriptional shifts in glial cells, including upregulated inflammatory pathways in and altered synaptic signaling in , which were linked to amyloid-beta plaque proximity. Kellis extended these findings to multi-omics atlases by integrating snRNA-seq with single-cell for transposase-accessible sequencing (scATAC-seq) to map accessibility changes, revealing noncoding regulatory variants that drive AD progression through glial and neuronal reprogramming. To address cellular mixtures in bulk data, Kellis co-authored development of single-cell methods applied to over 3,000 samples, quantifying shifts in cell-type abundance associated with and , facilitating the interpretation of disease variants at single-cell resolution. From 2023 to 2025, Kellis led expansions of multi-omics profiling in disorders through the Single-cell of Aging and (SEA-AD) initiative, generating atlases encompassing 1.3 million transcriptomic profiles and 850,000 epigenomic profiles across six regions from 283 donors. These datasets integrated snRNA-seq, scATAC-seq, and to delineate region-specific glial activation in and , providing resources for linking genetic variants to cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration. Such atlases support brief interpretations of disease variant by overlaying eQTLs onto cell-type-specific regulatory elements.

Awards and Honors

Early Career Awards

In the early stages of his career, Manolis Kellis received several prestigious awards recognizing his innovative contributions to and . In 2006, he was named one of MIT Technology Review's TR35 , honoring his development of algorithms for comparative genome analysis that revealed evolutionary patterns in DNA sequences. The following year, in 2007, Kellis was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) Award, which supported his research on integrating computational methods with biological data to uncover gene regulatory networks and functional elements in genomes. This grant underscored his potential as a leader in interdisciplinary science, providing funding for five years to advance his work at MIT. In 2008, Kellis earned the Research Fellowship, a highly competitive award given to exceptional early-career researchers in the natural and computational sciences, acknowledging his foundational algorithms for genome interpretation and evolutionary modeling. That same year, he received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the on outstanding scientists early in their careers, selected for his pioneering computational approaches to understanding genomic evolution and regulation. These early recognitions highlighted Kellis's emerging impact in , particularly through methods that bridged and to decode complex genetic information.

Recent Recognitions

In 2011, Manolis Kellis received the Niki Award from the President of the Hellenic Republic for his outstanding contributions to science and technology, recognizing his pioneering work in and . In 2019, Kellis was awarded the Mendel Medal for his contributions to and . In 2021, Kellis received the NIH Director's Pioneer Award, recognizing his high-risk, high-reward research in and disease mechanisms. In 2024, he was awarded the Research.com Genetics and Molecular Biology Leader Award in the United States, acknowledging his exceptional influence and leadership in advancing and research through innovative computational methods. The following year, in , Kellis received the Research.com Genetics Leader Award , further highlighting his role as a foremost in , driven by his development of algorithms and models that have transformed interpretation and mechanism elucidation. As of , Kellis's scholarly impact is evidenced by over 200,000 citations and an exceeding 140, metrics that underscore the enduring influence of his contributions across , , and related fields.

Public Engagement

Lectures and Talks

Manolis Kellis has been a prominent invited speaker at numerous academic conferences, seminars, and institutions, sharing insights into , regulatory networks, and their applications to human disease. His lectures often draw from his research in , , and AI-driven disease mechanisms, emphasizing integrative approaches to decode genomic function. Kellis has delivered numerous invited talks worldwide, reflecting his influence in the field. One of his early notable public engagements was the 2013 TEDxCambridge talk titled "Decoding a Genomic Revolution," where he explored how technological advances in sequencing and computation are transforming our understanding of the and its role in and . In 2014, Kellis delivered a keynote lecture on "Regulatory Genomics and of Complex " at the Genome Campus Advanced Courses' Epigenomics of Common Diseases conference, highlighting the interplay between , epigenetic modifications, and disease susceptibility. Kellis has also been a keynote speaker at International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) conferences, including the RECOMB/ISCB Conference on Regulatory and Systems Genomics in 2016 and the RSG-DREAM challenge meeting in 2022, where his presentations focused on computational methods for analyzing genomic data and inferring regulatory networks. More recently, in 2023, following his receipt of the Argo Science Award from the President of the Hellenic Republic, Kellis participated in a fireside chat at the (NTUA), discussing the integration of AI in genomic and innovation in . In 2025, Kellis delivered keynotes at events including the ICML Foundations in Biology workshop (July 19), the Universal AI Summit (July 8), and the Greeks in AI conference (July 20), addressing AI applications in and . In September 2025, Kellis presented a seminar at Harvard Medical School's Department of on the role of in elucidating disease , covering predictive models for variant interpretation and therapeutic targeting.

Media Appearances

Kellis engaged in public outreach through a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session in June 2016, hosted on r/science, where he discussed his research on the , including the project's insights into functional genomic elements and applications to understanding diseases such as , Alzheimer's, and cancer. Participants queried him on the integration of AI in , the non-coding genome's role in disease mechanisms, and ethical considerations in genetic research, allowing Kellis to explain complex topics accessibly to a broad audience. In 2015, amid the release of the Roadmap Epigenomics Consortium's findings, Kellis was quoted in major media outlets highlighting epigenomics breakthroughs, such as in , where he described the project as providing "an unprecedented view of the living " through mapping regulatory circuits across cell types. He emphasized how these maps reveal dynamics essential for health and , bridging computational analysis with biological interpretation for non-expert readers. Similarly, in a article, Kellis underscored the epigenome's necessity for advancing precision medicine, stating that "the only way you can deliver on the promise of precision medicine is by including the epigenome." By 2020, Kellis's contributions to the GTEx Consortium were covered in Science magazine, which featured the project's atlas of genetic regulatory effects across 49 human tissues, detailing how variants influence and splicing to inform disease mechanisms. The coverage highlighted Kellis's role in integrating multi-omics data to uncover tissue-specific regulatory patterns, with implications for interpreting non-coding variants in common diseases. This work received widespread media attention for its potential to personalize medical treatments based on genetic regulation. Kellis has advanced public science communication via op-eds and interviews on precision medicine, often advocating for the integration of genomic and epigenomic to enable targeted therapies. For instance, in discussions around epigenomic mapping, he has articulated how such approaches can transform diagnostics and treatments by focusing on regulatory rather than just coding variations. He appeared on podcasts like the Podcast in July 2020, exploring the human genome's evolutionary dynamics and AI's role in decoding it for applications, reaching listeners interested in interdisciplinary . A follow-up episode in 2023 delved into AI's broader societal impacts, including its applications in biology. In recent years, Kellis received the Argo Science Award from the in November 2023, earning coverage in Greek media for his contributions to and . The award ceremony and subsequent events, such as a fireside chat at the , highlighted his Greek heritage and global impact, with discussions broadcast to promote in the region. From 2024 to 2025, Kellis has addressed AI in through media appearances, including a CSAIL Alliances episode in January 2025, where he examined the ethical challenges of AI surpassing human capabilities in genomic analysis and the need for responsible integration in . He also contributed to conversations on AI's role in , stressing symbiotic human-AI collaboration to avoid ethical pitfalls in areas like generation and predictive modeling.

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