Pawel Przytycki joins the CDS Faculty at BU

Boston University is proud to welcome Pawel Przytycki as assistant professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) and a core faculty member in the Bioinformatics Program.

Chemistry Professor Tom Tullius who directs the BU Bioinformatics Program notes that "Przytycki’s background in both computer science and genomics, and in particular his focus on algorithm development, makes him an exciting addition to the Bioinformatics faculty. Pawel’s work is ideally situated to connect CDS and the Bioinformatics Program." 

A Bioinformatics Fellow at the Gladstone Institutes at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Pawel's research is focused on the development of novel computational methods to understand the regulatory effects of noncoding variants in neurological development and diseases. While high-throughput genetic sequencing makes it possible to unravel the genetics of these diseases, sequencing data is often sparse, high-dimensional, and heterogeneous across individuals and cells. Pawel's work addresses these challenges through development of algorithms for integrating and interpreting large-scale multi-modal genomics data.

"Pawel Przytycki’s arrival at BU is an exciting moment for CDS" exclaimed CS and CDS Professor Mark Crovella, adding that his work attacking the challenge of integrating multi-omics data is "groundbreaking, and holds promise for addressing a wide range of problems in systems biology. He could not be joining BU at a better time, a time when biological science is awash in new and exciting data, and needs creative thinking to extract insight."

Elaborating on the collaborative opportunities ahead, Assistant Professor of Biology and CDS Faculty Fellow Ana Fiszbein noted that "Pawel's  contributions to the study of cancer genomics with new algorithms and networks, as well as his new methods to study single-cell epigenomics is highly synergistic with our research, and I very much look forward to working together on these exciting topics."

In welcoming him to CDS, Professor Azer Bestavros, Associate Provost for CDS characterized Pawel as "the personification of an algorithmic computational biologist who will engage and collaborate with so many of our faculty in CDS." Commenting on Pawel's track record of integrating "beautiful mathematical and algorithmic techniques" into software tools and platforms, Bestavros added "one only needs to look at his GitHub repo to appreciate the impact of working at the nexus of disciplines -- that's what CDS is all about." 

Pawel completed his PhD in Computer Science at Princeton University, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.