David Kelley

David Kelley is a Principal Investigator at Calico Life Sciences, where he studies gene regulation in aging. He completed his PhD in computer science at the U. of Maryland with Steven Salzberg, working on algorithms for genome assembly and gene prediction. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoc with John Rinn at Harvard on computational analyses of long noncoding RNA regulation and function. David developed the deep convolutional neural network toolkits Basset, Basenji, Enformer, and Borzoi to predict tissue-specific regulatory activity of DNA sequences. His group is interested in fully elucidating the mechanisms by which a regulatory environment acts on whole chromosomes to determine the expression of every gene. At Calico, he’s applying such models to study how disturbed regulatory connections influence the increased rate of disease onset over human lifespans.