Prof. Elhanan Borenstein

The human microbiome - the complex ensemble of microorganisms that populate the human body - has a tremendous impact on our health. World-wide research initiatives and novel metagenomics-based studies now provide exciting insights into the previously uncharted composition of the microbiome, and reveal marked compositional changes associated with a wide range of diseases. Yet, a system-level understanding of the human microbiome and its impact on the host is still lacking. To address this challenge, Prof. Elhanan Borenstein focuses on computational study of the human microbiome, spearheading research in microbiome systems biology. His group develops novel computational methods inspired by data science, machine learning, metabolic modeling, and network theory to model the microbiome, to analyze multi-omic microbiome data, and to better understand the role of the microbiome in health and in disease.

Prof. Borenstein is an associate professor at the Blavatnik School of Computer Science and at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. He is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a faculty fellow of TAU’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics. Prof. Borenstein received his BSc in physics and computer science and his PhD in computer science from Tel-Aviv University, and held a joint postdoctoral position at Stanford University and the Santa Fe Institute. In 2010, he joined the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington as a faculty member, and in 2018, moved to Tel Aviv University with a joint appointment in Medicine and in Computer Science. Prof. Borenstein is the recipient of various prestigious awards including the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the NIH New Innovator Award.