Vamsi Mootha

Vamsi K. Mootha is an Indian-born American physician-scientist and computational biologist. He is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Systems Biology and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and is based in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute.^[1]

His research group has made major contributions to mitochondrial and systems biology. His group characterized the mammalian mitochondrial proteome, identified dozens of mitochondrial disease genes, and discovered the molecular identity of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter. His team has also made the unexpected discovery that in animal models, low oxygen can prevent and alleviate mitochondrial disease. As a postdoctoral fellow he developed Gene Set Enrichment Analysis, an algorithm that is widely used in genomics and has been implemented into a popular software tool.

He is a 2004 recipient of the Macarthur Foundation "genius award". He received the 2008 Daland Prize from the American Philosophical Society and a 2014 Padma Shri Award from the Republic of India, the fourth highest civilian award given by the Indian government.^[2][3][4][5] He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He also served on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2017.

Mootha graduated from Kelly High School in Beaumont, Texas. Mootha received his BS in Mathematical and Computational Science from Stanford University and his M.D. from Harvard University. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and then pursued postdoctoral training with Eric Lander at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.^[6]

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