Mehrtash Babadi
Senior Research Leader at Isomorphic Labs
London, England, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMehrtash Babadi is a Senior Research Leader based in London with a decade of experience at the intersection of machine learning, statistical physics, and genomics, currently leading research at Isomorphic Labs to model living systems as information-processing code. He previously held progressive research and leadership roles at the Broad Institute, where he built and productionized Bayesian models for genomic analysis (notably contributing to the GATK ecosystem) and led the Cellarium AI Lab and single-cell methods group. Mehrtash combines deep theoretical training—a PhD in Physics from Harvard and postdoctoral work at Caltech—with hands-on software engineering in Python, PyTorch, and probabilistic programming (Pyro), shipping scalable cloud workflows. His contributions include robust back-end development for GATK, improving CNV analysis tools and sex genotyping, reflecting a focus on making cutting-edge methods reliable and maintainable in production. Colleagues describe him as driven by interpretability and actionable outcomes, translating “hard” theoretical insights into practical biomedical tools. He also brings an unconventional blend of scientific rigor and creative leadership, evidenced by earlier roles bridging research, mentorship, and even musical ensemble direction.
10 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
High School, High School at Allameh HelliDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physics, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Physics at Harvard UniversityBachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Physics and Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Physics and Mathematics at Sharif University of Technology
English, Persian
Stackoverflow
11reputation
214reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (12)
bioinformatics10
javas10
genome10
genomics10
java10
genomes10
data-analysis9
rdd6
apache-spark6
partitioning6
r6
python5
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
broadinstitute/gatk
Mar 2016 - Jul 2018
Official code repository for GATK versions 4 and up
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:45 commits, 23 PRs, 227 pushes in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Mehrtash primarily contributed to the GATK codebase by addressing bugs and implementing features related to data processing and analysis. Their work included fixing issues in R plotting scripts used for (A)CNV analysis and improving the sex genotyper tool. The user also added functionality to handle user-provided target lists and refactored code for clarity and maintainability, showing their focus on improving existing tools and features.
genomesciencednaspark-mlngs
broadinstitute/gatk-protected
Mar 2016 - Jun 2017
Contributions:125 commits, 32 PRs, 371 pushes in 1 year 3 months
gatkbroadinstitute
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