Michael Schatz

Michael Schatz, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Biology at Johns Hopkins University, is among the world’s foremost experts in solving computational problems in genomics research. His innovative biotechnologies and computational tools to study the sequence and function of genomes are advancing the understanding of the structure, evolution, and function of genomes for medicine – particularly autism spectrum disorders, cancer, and other human diseases – and agriculture.

Schatz, who founded and directs the Schatz Lab, has created many of the most widely used methods and software to assemble the full genetic material for a single person or a species.

Schatz holds appointments in the Department of Computer Science at the Whiting School of Engineering and in the Department of Biology at JHU Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He also serves as a cancer prevention and control program member for Johns Hopkins’ Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. Prior to joining JHU in 2016, he spent six years at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) where he co-led the Cancer Genetics & Genomics Program in the CSHL Cancer Center. Schatz remains a CSHL adjunct associate professor of Quantitative Biology.

Recent awards include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology, in 2015, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2014. Schatz’s earlier honors are Young Investigator of the Year, Genome Technology (2010), and the twice-awarded Winship Herr Award for Excellence in Teaching, Watson School for Biological Science. His leadership of the computational biology field includes founding in 2012 a new, interdisciplinary CSHL conference on Biological Data Science, as well as a regular member of the program committees to Genome Informatics, RECOMB, ISMB, WABI, and several other top conferences. Schatz was named as one of Time's 100 Most Influential people in 2022.

Schatz serves on the editorial boards of Genome Biology, GigaScience, and Cell Systems, and he has served as a reviewer for Nature, Cell, Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Methods, Genome Research, Genome Medicine, and Bioinformatics. His innovative discoveries have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wired.