Jason Ernst

Position Titles

Professor, Biological Chemistry

Professor, Computer Science

Professor, Computational Medicine

Biography

Jason joined the faculty at UCLA in the Department of Biological Chemistry, the Computer Science Department, and the Bioinformatics Program in 2012. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Manolis Kellis’ Computational Biology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and affiliated with the Broad Institute. In 2008, Jason completed a PhD advised by Ziv Bar-Joseph where he was part of the Systems Biology Group, Machine Learning Department, and School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Jason also earned BS degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Maryland College Park in 2002.

Jason’s research focuses on developing and applying computational methods to address problems in epigenomics and gene-regulation. Jason serves on the editorial board at Genome Research and has been a program co-chair for the Regulatory Genomics Special Interest Group meeting at ISMB. He is a recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Siebel Scholarship, and a Goldwater Scholarship.

Research Description

Jason’s research interests are in computational biology and bioinformatics. He is interested in developing and applying computational methods, in particular machine learning methods, for the analysis of high-throughput experimental data to address problems in epigenomics and gene regulation. A primary interest of his is developing computational approaches to use epigenomic and other high-throughput datasets to better understand the non-coding portions of the human genome and its role in disease. Jason pioneered computational approaches to learn chromatin states from genome-wide maps of multiple epigenetic marks to systematically annotate the human genome. His research is often conducted in close collaboration with experimental groups.

Awards & Honors

2013    NSF Career Award
2013    Sloan Research Fellowship
2009    NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
2007    Siebel Scholar Fellowship
2000    Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship