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Orr Ashenberg is associate director of computational biology, leading research efforts spanning the Klarman Cell Observatory and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Ó³»­´«Ã½, where he is also an institute scientist. bridges machine learning with human disease biology and he develops computational approaches that reveal how diseases progress at the molecular and cellular level. These approaches integrate observational data from single-cell and spatial omics technologies with interventional data from functional genomics experiments. The goal is mechanistic, causal views of disease that enable rational design of interventions. Towards this goal, his group has developed new approaches to profile patient cancer tissues as part of the Human Tumor Atlas network, discovered a druggable immune inhibitory receptor in glioblastoma, and characterized genetic variants associated with inflammatory bowel disease.

Beyond his research, Ashenberg engages the broader community through the design of public machine learning competitions, centered around cancer, autoimmune disease, and obesity, that each drew over 1000 participants. In addition, he co-chairs the Models, Inference, and Algorithms (MIA) Initiative at the Ó³»­´«Ã½ and teaches courses on single-cell and spatial transcriptomics. 

Prior to joining the Ó³»­´«Ã½, Ashenberg completed his postdoctoral work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, working with Jesse Bloom, and completed his Ph.D. in computational and systems biology at MIT, working with Amy Keating and Michael Laub. He received his A.B. in chemistry from Harvard College.