Manolis Kellis

Kellis was born in March 1977.⁠[1]

He writes that he was born in Athens, Greece, the youngest child of John and Anna Kamvysselis, after his sister Maria and brother Panayiotis.⁠[2]

When he was twelve his father, wanting his children to be bilingual, moved the family to Aix-en-Provence, France; about four years later they moved to New York, where he earned his Baccalauréat at the Lycée Français de New York.⁠[2]

In 1993 he won first prize for southern France in a nationwide French mathematics competition.⁠[1]

He, his brother and his sister were all admitted to MIT in the same year.⁠[2]

Before computational biology he worked on artificial intelligence, sketch and image recognition, robotics and computational geometry at MIT and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.⁠[3]

He received his bachelor’s and MEng degrees from MIT in 1999. As a first-year graduate student he saw human genome sequence data shown by a friend and decided overnight to devote himself to interpreting genomes computationally.⁠[4]

On May 15, 2003, he published as first author “Sequencing and comparison of yeast species to identify genes and regulatory elements” in Nature, volume 423.⁠[5]

In 2003 he received his PhD from MIT with the thesis Computational Comparative Genomics: Genes, Regulation, Evolution, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute from June 2003 to June 2004. He received MIT’s Sprowls award for the best PhD thesis in computer science.⁠[1]

In 2004 he joined the MIT faculty in electrical engineering and computer science, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Broad Institute; he received tenure in 2011 and heads the MIT Computational Biology Group.⁠[4]

In September 2006, at 29, he was named to Technology Review’s list of innovators under 35 for developing algorithms to analyze the entire genomes of different species; having validated his methods in yeast, he had moved on to comparing the human genome with those of the mouse, rat and dog.⁠[6]

At the time he was an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, holding the Class of 1964 Distinguished Alumni Career Development Chair.⁠[7]

In November 2010 MIT announced that he had received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), on the nomination of the National Institutes of Health.⁠[8]

In October 2011 an international team led by the Broad Institute and including Kellis published in Nature a comparison of 29 mammalian genomes, mapping more than 3.5 million constrained elements covering about 4% of the human genome and identifying 3,788 candidate new exons.⁠[9]

On February 18, 2015, he and his team, leading the integrative analysis for the Roadmap Epigenomics project, published 111 human reference epigenomes in Nature, using machine learning to define 15 chromatin states and grouping some 2 million predicted regulatory regions into 200 coordinated modules.⁠[10]

On August 19, 2015, he, as senior author, and first author Melina Claussnitzer published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that the FTO region, the strongest genetic association with obesity, acts mainly in fat-cell progenitors through IRX3 and IRX5 to switch between fat storage and heat dissipation; editing a single nucleotide with CRISPR/Cas9 switched human pre-adipocytes between lean and obese signatures.⁠[11]

The 17th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2018), held in Athens from September 8 to 12, 2018, listed him as a keynote speaker.⁠[12]

On May 1, 2019, he and Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute, as senior authors published in Nature the first comprehensive analysis of gene expression in individual brain cells of Alzheimer’s patients, finding that axon myelination is significantly disrupted and that male and female brain cells differ markedly in their gene responses to the disease.⁠[13]

On July 31, 2020, he first appeared on the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast (episode 113), discussing the human genome, free will, genome-wide evolutionary signatures, the evolution of COVID-19, viruses and the immune system, and deep learning.⁠[14]

On September 12, 2020, he returned for episode 123, talking about the epigenome, Neanderthals, the origin of life on Earth and the transformation of human ideas, and reading two poems.⁠[15]

On October 25, 2020, he appeared for a third time (episode 133), on the biology of disease, covering the genetic component of diseases, genome circuitry, CRISPR and mitochondria.⁠[16]

On November 30, 2020, he appeared for a fourth time (episode 142), discussing music and life, the meaning of life, human civilization, neural networks and intelligence, and ideas as organisms; the episode page lists the Greek songs he mentioned.⁠[17]

On May 11, 2021, he, as senior author, with Irwin Jungreis and Rachel Sealfon published in Nature Communications a comparison of 44 Sarbecovirus genomes giving what they described as the most complete annotation of SARS-CoV-2 protein-coding genes, and found a region of the nucleocapsid protein with far more mutations than its history predicted.⁠[18]

On April 21, 2023, he appeared for a fifth time (episode 373), on the evolution of human civilization and superintelligent AI, including AI alignment, AI’s impact on the job market, human-AI relationships, AI rights and regulation, and whether to halt AI development.⁠[19]

On October 14, 2025, he spoke online at the AIxMHC 2025 international conference organized by Asia University in Taiwan, on “Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Genomic Medicine.”⁠[20]

He is a professor of computer science at MIT, a member of CSAIL and the Broad Institute and director of the MIT Computational Biology Group, working on computational biology, genomics, AI-driven drug discovery and the Mantis knowledge-exploration platform, with more than 325 journal publications. He argues that artificial general intelligence has been achieved and that too many guardrails should not be placed on AI technology.⁠[21]

He has helped lead large-scale genomics projects including ENCODE and GTEx, and his awards include the Mendel Medal, the NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award and the AIT Niki Award.⁠[22]

Personal website: Public link: https://web.mit.edu/manoli/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

X: Public account: https://x.com/manoliskellis (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ManolisKellis1 (opens in a new window)⁠[19]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[7]

Broad Institute of MIT and HarvardHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry: Official website: https://www.broadinstitute.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]