Nezar Abdennur | Artis Ventures

Postdoctoral Researcher, MIT

Computational biology; Machine learning

Nezar Abdennur, PhD

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Nezar is a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT, where he also did his PhD in computational biology, specializing in the 3D organization of the genome and its relationship to the epigenome. He is from Ottawa, Canada and now lives in the Boston area.

His life sciences studies began in biochemistry and biophysics, and now are heavily focused on data science, machine learning and scientific software development initiatives to drive biomedical discovery.

Nezar also loves working across disciplines, exploring connections between disparate fields such as genomics and quantitative finance.

Outside of science, software, and entrepreneurship, he enjoys running, sketching and playing with his infant daughter.

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HEALTHCARE ADVANCEMENT YOU HOPE TO SEE IN YOUR LIFETIME

Better public health monitoring integrated into our urban infrastructure. As modern societies we will need to develop a better collective immune system to intercept and curtail emerging infectious diseases before they become pandemics.

GREATEST IMPACT IN TECH/HEALTH

Next-generation DNA sequencing. As Linus Torvalds once said about Git “If you can do something really fast really well people start using it differently”. I’d add “really cheap” to that list. Low cost NGS allowed us to not just use sequencing for its own sake (assemble genomes and call variants), but gave rise to all the “Layer 2” technologies that exploit DNA sequencing as a readout to profile and measure all kinds of other biological information that has and will continue to revolutionize medicine.

MOST INFLUENTIAL CONTENT READ LAST YEAR

I recently read Ray Dalio’s book on managing debt crises, which has changed my perspective on the dynamics of credit (and stimulus) in economic cycles.