Itai Yanai (; born 6 February 1975) is an American-Israeli biomedical scientist and Founding Director of the Institute for Computational Medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He is also a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at NYU.
Early life and education Yanai was born in Haifa, Israel, and moved with his family to Boston in his early teens, when his father Moshe Yanai was appointed Chief Engineer at EMC. He graduated from Boston University in 1998 with degrees in computer engineering and philosophy, both summa cum laude. In 2002 he became the first person in the nation to receive a Ph.D. in, what was at the time, the fledgling field of Bioinformatics. After several years at the Weizmann Institute and Harvard University, he returned to Israel in 2008 as a faculty member at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He moved to the United States in 2016, when he assumed his current position.
Research Yanai has published extensively in bioinformaticsYanai, I. & Hunter, C. P. Comparison of diverse developmental transcriptomes reveals that coexpression of gene neighbors is not evolutionarily conserved. Genome Research. 19, 2214– 20 (2009)Kopelman, N. M., Lancet, D. & Yanai, I. Alternative splicing and gene duplication are inversely correlated evolutionary mechanisms. Nature Genetics. 37, 588–589 (2005)Yanai, I., Mellor, J. C. & DeLisi, C. Identifying functional links between genes using conserved chromosomal proximity. Trends in Genetics. 18, 176-179 (2002) and theory.Hashimshony, T., Feder, M., Levin, M., Hall, B. K. & Yanai, I. Spatiotemporal transcriptomics reveals the evolutionary history of the endoderm germ layer. Nature. 519, 219–222 (2015) He has also done seminal experimental research in cell biology.Levin, M., Anavy, L., Cole, A. G., Winter, E., Mostov, N., Khair, S., Senderovich, N., Kovalev, E., Silver, D. H., Feder, M., Fernandez-Valverde, S. L., Nakanishi, N., Simmons, D., Simakov, O., Larsson, T., Liu, S., Jerafi-Vider, A., Yaniv, K., Ryan, J. F., Martindale, M. Q., Rink, J., Arendt, D., Degnan, S. M., Degnan, B. M., Hashimshony, T. & Yanai I. The mid-developmental transition and the evolution of animal body plans. Nature. 531, 637–641 (2016)Hashimshony, T., Wagner, F., Sher, N. & Yanai, I. CEL-Seq: Single-cell RNA-Seq by multiplexed linear amplification. Cell Reports. 2, 666-673 (2012)
In 2016 Yanai co-authored a popular book for the general public.Yanai, I. & Lercher, M. The Society of Genes. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA USA, 2016).
Together with Martin J. Lercher, Yanai has written a series of editorials on the creative side of the scientific process,Yanai, I. & Lercher, M. The Night Science collection https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science which he called "Night Science" in reference to François Jacob. He also co-hosts a popular podcast with the same name.The Night Science Podcast. https://nightscience.buzzsprout.com/
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