Gyan Bhanot

Gyan Bhanot is currently a faculty member at Rutgers University, with a joint appointment in the department of Physics and Astronomy and the department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. Trained as a theoretical physicist (Ph.D.: Cornell 1979, advisor Kurt Gottfried), he worked in the areas of particle physics and statistical mechanics as a post-doc (Brookhaven National Laboratory, Institute for Advanced Study, the European Organization for Nuclear Research [CERN], Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics) and as faculty (Florida State University) before joining Thinking Machines Corporation in 1994 to do research on parallel computation. He spent twelve years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY where he worked on application software for the Blue Gene supercomputer before joining Rutgers University in 2006. He switched to Biology/Biophysics in 2001 after reading his daughter’s Advanced Placement Biology textbook. His current research interests are in computational biology, focusing on cancer biology and epidemiology.