Charles DeLisi

Charles DeLisi is an American Biomedical scientist who has made mathematical, computational and experimental contributions to various areas of cell and systems biology including protein and DNA structure and function, gene regulation, cancer genetics and immunology. His most recent publications have focused on climate change.

After receiving a BA in History from the City College of New York, he obtained his PhD in Physics from NYU (1965-1969), followed by post-doctoral research in biophysical chemistry at Yale. In 1972, he was appointed staff scientist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in 1977 he was appointed senior investigator with tenure at NIH. In 1980, he became Founding Head of the Section on Theoretical Immunology at NCI, NIH, and in 1983, he was promoted to Chief of the Laboratory of Mathematical Biology. It was at NIH that he and Minoru Kanehisa developed one of the earliest data bases of nucleic acid and protein sequence and structure integrated with algorithms that they and others developed for inferring structure and function.

In 1985, Dr. DeLisi was appointed Director of the Department of Energy's Health and Environmental Research Programs. In 1986, he, Renato Dulbecco, and Robert Sinsheimer independently proposed the concept of a reference human genome, and DeLisi successfully translated that into policy, obtaining a line item in President Reagan’s 1987 budget submission to Congress.

In 1987, DeLisi moved to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine as Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomathematical Science and Professor of Molecular Biology. From 1990 -2000, he served as Dean of Boston University’s College of Engineering, and in 1999, he proposed and obtained NSF funding for establishing the Nation's first graduate program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, which he Chaired for more than a decade. In 1999, he was also appointed the first Arthur Metcalf Professor of Science and Engendering at Boston University, a position he held until his retirement in 2024.

He is recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Presidential Citizens Medal (President Clinton) and the Informa Clinical and Research Excellence Lifetime Achievement award.