Nadav Brandes

Nadav Brandes is an Assistant Professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where he is a core faculty member in the Center for Human Genetics and Genomics and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, with an affiliation at the Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing and Data Science. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his postdoctoral training at UCSF. His research explores how artificial intelligence can understand the consequences of genetic variation. He was among the early pioneers of large language models for biological sequences, and his work has shown that models trained on DNA and protein sequences learn fundamental biological principles and can predict which mutations are likely to cause disease. His group applies genomic AI to biomedical challenges such as genetic diagnosis, disease risk prediction, cell therapies, and mechanistic interpretation of pathogenic mutations. He is active in scientific communication through teaching, blogging, open online courses, and open-source research.