VP Computational Biology and Translation gRED Computational Sciences

Dr. Sara Mostafavi is Vice President and Global Head of AI Biology & Translation at Roche & Genentech, where she leads efforts at the intersection of artificial intelligence, genomics, and translational biology. For over two decades, she has been a pioneer in applying machine learning to understand complex biological systems. Before joining Genentech, Sara was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Paul G. Allen School at the University of Washington. Prior to that, she held faculty appointments in both Statistics and Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia and was a core faculty member at the Vector Institute for AI in Toronto. She co-founded the Machine Learning in Computational Biology (MLCB) conference, a premier forum advancing the interface of ML and biology. Sara completed her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 2010 and conducted postdoctoral research at Stanford University under Daphne Koller, followed by a focused year in immunology at Harvard Medical School with Christophe Benoist and Diane Mathis. She has been recognized with numerous honors, including a Canada Research Chair in Computational Biology and election as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Her most recent work has pioneered the development of sequence-to-function deep neural networks to model gene regulation and cellular differentiation, particularly in the immune system. These models are used to interpret the effects of non-coding genetic variation in personal genomes, uncover the regulatory logic of cell fate decisions, and identify molecular drivers of cell-state transitions in health and disease.