Aviv Regev

Aviv Regev, a computational and systems biologist, joined the Broad Institute as a core member and MIT as a faculty member in 2006. Regev’s research centers on understanding how complex molecular circuits function in cells and between cells in tissues.

Regev is a professor in the Department of Biology at MIT, Chair of the Faculty and founding director of the Klarman Cell Observatory and Cell Circuits Program at the Broad, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her lab has been a pioneer of single-cell genomics – inventing key experimental methods and computational algorithms in the field, and demonstrating how to apply it to understand cell taxonomies, histological organization, differentiation and physiological processes, and how to infer the molecular and cellular circuits that control the function of cells and tissues in health and disease. She co-founded and co-leads the international initiative to build a Human Cell Atlas (HCA), whose mission is to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells—the fundamental units of life—as a basis for both understanding human health and diagnosing, monitoring, and treating disease.

Regev is a recipient of the 2008 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the 2008 Overton Prize and 2017 Innovator Prizes from the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and is a Class of 2016 ISCB Fellow, the 2014 Earl and Thressa Stadtman Scholar Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the 2017 Paul Marks Prize.

Prior to joining the Broad Institute, Regev was a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University, where she developed new approaches to the reconstruction of regulatory networks and modules from genomic data. Regev received her M.Sc. from Tel Aviv University, studying biology, computer science, and mathematics in the Interdisciplinary Program for the Fostering of Excellence. She received her Ph.D. in computational biology from Tel Aviv University.