Vamsi Mootha

Vamsi K Mootha is an American physician-scientist and computational biologist of Indian descent. 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]

He and his research group have made fundamental major contributions to mitochondrial and systems biology. His group characterized the mammalian mitochondrial proteome, identified numerous Mendelian mitochondrial disease genes, discovered the full molecular identity of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter, and 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, one of the highest civilian awards given by the Indian government.[2][3][4][5] He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2014. In 2016, he was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for Science [6]

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.[7]