John Quackenbush, PhD

Departments of Pediatrics & Human Genetics, University of Chicago
Harvard TH Chan Schoolof Public Health
Channing Division of Network Medicine of Brigham & Women’s Hospital

John Quackenbush is Professor of Pediatrics and Human Genetics in the Division of Biological Sciences and the program in AI and Biological Complexity at the University of Chicago, and a member of the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center. John’s PhD was in Theoretical Physics, but a fellowship to work on the Human Genome Project led him through the Salk Institute, Stanford University, and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), Harvard in 2005, and UChicago in 2026. John’s research uses massive amounts of data to probe how many small genetic and other effects combine to influence our health and disease risk. Key to his approach is modeling gene regulatory networks and understanding how these networks change between health and disease, over time, as a function of sex and gender, and between individuals. His more than 350 published papers have more than 106,000 citations, and his “NetZoo” software tools have tens of thousands of downloads. Among his honors is recognition in 2013 as a White House Open Science Champion of Change. In 2012, he founded Genospace, a precision medicine software company that was sold to Hospital Corporation of America in 2017. In 2022, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.