Dana Pe'er is currently the Chair and Professor in Computational and Systems Biology Program at Sloan Kettering Institute, and regarded as one of the leading researchers in computational systems biology. Previously, she was a professor at Columbia Department of Biological Sciences. The Pe’er 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.
Pe'er has won several prestigious awards including a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award, a NSF CAREER award and a Stand Up To Cancer Innovative Research Grant. She was awarded an NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2007 in order to investigate how genetic variations can cause changes throughout the whole body which can lead to autoimmune disease and cancer. Pe'er was awarded a Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 2009. She was awarded the ISCB Overton Prize in 2014 for her significant contribution to research, particularly in using computational methods to understand the organization and function of molecular networks in cells. She was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator in September, 2021.