Rate My Professor Erez Aiden

Erez Lieberman Aiden is a distinguished scientist whose research centers on the three-dimensional architecture of genomes, integrating applied mathematics, molecular biology, and biophysics. He received an AB in Mathematics from Princeton University in 2002. In 2010, he was awarded PhDs in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and in Bioengineering from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, with a thesis on 'Evolution and the Emergence of Structure' advised by Eric Lander and Martin Nowak. Early contributions include co-founding evolutionary graph theory, published in Nature in 2005 as 'Evolutionary dynamics on graphs'.

Aiden's career encompasses a fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2010-2013), visiting faculty position at Google, and McNair Scholar at Baylor College of Medicine. He currently serves as Professor of Biosciences at Rice University and Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Texas Medical Branch, directing the Aiden Lab and Center for Genome Architecture. At ShanghaiTech University's Shanghai Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Studies, he leads the Genome Spatial Structure Laboratory. Aiden invented the Hi-C method in 2009, detailed in Science ('Comprehensive Mapping of Long-Range Interactions Reveals Folding Principles of the Human Genome'), enabling genome-wide chromatin interaction mapping and revealing DNA folds into a fractal globule. Key subsequent publications include 'A 3D Map of the Human Genome at Kilobase Resolution Reveals Principles of Chromatin Looping' in Cell (2014) and 'Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books' in Science (2011). His innovations have transformed genome assembly and evolutionary studies across species. Awards include the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize (2008), Technology Review TR35 (2009), American Physical Society Outstanding Doctoral Thesis in Biological Physics (2010), Hertz Thesis Prize (2010), NIH Director's New Innovator Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011), GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists (2011), Harold M. Weintraub Graduate Student Award (2010), and 2023 Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Physical Sciences.