Michael B. Eisen

American computational biologist and journal editor

Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the former editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and development at University of California, Berkeley.²

From Wikipedia’s article on Michael B. Eisen (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Apr 13, 1967.¹

About

He is a leading advocate of open access scientific publishing and is co-founder of Public Library of Science (PLOS). In 2018, Eisen announced his candidacy U.S. Senate from California as an independent, though he failed to qualify for the ballot.

From Wikipedia’s article on Michael B. Eisen, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.²

Companies

Public Library of ScienceFounder¹³

Early life and education

Date not recordedWalt Whitman High School³
Date not recordedHarvard University³

Born in Boston, Eisen and his brother Jonathan were raised in a family of scientists. Their grandfather was an x-ray crystallographer, their father, Howard Eisen a physician, and mother, Laura a biochemist. They moved to Bethesda, Maryland when Eisen was four or five years old. The brothers spent summers in Long Island with their grandparents. Eisen states that he loved frogs and salamanders '"Even more than I have a frog fetish, I have a swamp fetish. I really like being in swamps."' He was also very interested in math and was captain of the high school math team. Eisen graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1985. Intending to major in mathematics at Harvard University, he realized that there [he may encounter] other more brilliant math students, it was a Good Will Hunting moment and he decided that he did not want to major in mathematics, '"You don't want to be Salieri to Mozart."' During his years at Harvard, Eisen worked on "unlocking the three-dimensional structures of proteins." He was shown a DNA microarray which taught him a '"new way of doing biology"'.

Eisen completed his PhD at Harvard University in biophysics and a B.S. (also from Harvard) in Math. He was under the supervision of Don Craig Wiley while studying Influenza A virus Proteins.

There are things that are really really difficult, those are the kinds of problems you do want to work on. It's not that easy to tell the difference between impossible problems and a problem that is really really difficult. But learning to do so is critically important. - Things I learned from working with Pat Brown (Patrick O. Brown) - 2015

After earning his doctorate, Eisen was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in the lab of David Botstein, where he most notably developed a method for interpreting gene expression data from microarrays. The seminal research publication that Eisen authored about this project has been cited over 16,000 times.

Baseball and biology

When Eisen lived in Tennessee he worked as a play-by-play announcer for a minor league baseball team, the Columbia Mules. He is a self-proclaimed Red Sox fanatic. He and computational biologist James Fraser recorded a video for iBiology about the role baseball statistics influenced their research. Their argument is that sequencing DNA is similar to scoring a baseball game, and that many computational biologists learned to think about science computations from an obsessive interest in baseball stats. The exercise of comparing a specific player's stats to a database of other similar players allows a baseball fan to predict future performance. This same system works with proteins and predicting functions. As tools are developed that break down and track all stats concerning baseball players, so will technology improve with genetics. With both baseball and genetics, tools are being developed that refine the models. In a lecture in 2015, Eisen stated that he received a computer from his grandfather for his twelfth birthday and spent the next five years teaching himself how to program so that he could keep track of baseball stats.

From Wikipedia’s article on Michael B. Eisen (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: bioinformatician, biologist.⁷

Since 2005Professor, University of California, Berkeley^{4 5}
Date not recordedWorked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory⁴
Date not recordedWorked at University of California, Berkeley⁴
Date not recordedFounded Public Library of Science⁶

Known for: Public Library of Science.⁸

Personal life

BornApr 13, 1967, Boston⁹
CitizenshipUnited States¹⁰

Awards

2002Benjamin Franklin Award¹¹

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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WikidataMichael B. Eisen on Wikidata
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WikipediaMichael B. Eisen on Wikipedia
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: education, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: Worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, on Wikidata
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WikidataProfessor, University of California, Berkeley, as reported by ORCID Public Data File 2023
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: Founded Public Library of Science, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: occupation, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: notable work, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: place of birth, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: citizenship, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: award, on Wikidata
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WikidataMichael B. Eisen: X, on Wikidata
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WikidataPublic Library of Science, Founder