Biography

Vamsi Mootha is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Systems Biology and of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory is based in the Department of Molecular Biology and Center for Genome Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Mootha leads a research team dedicated to mitochondrial biology.

Dr. Mootha received his BS (with honors, with distinction) in Mathematical and Computational Science at Stanford University. He then received his MD (cum laude) from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, where his thesis research focused on mitochondrial energetics. Following an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he pursued postdoctoral training in genomics at the Whitehead Institute.

His research group consists of clinicians, computer scientists, and biologists, who work collaboratively to elucidate the network properties of mitochondria, and how these properties go awry in human disease. His work has led to the discovery of nearly 20 Mendelian disease genes, to the discovery that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with the common form of type 2 diabetes mellitus, and to the discovery of all of the molecular components of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter.  His team has also developed generic, computational tools that have been widely used in biomedical research.

Dr. Mootha has received a number of honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Judson Daland Prize of the American Philosophical Society, the Keilin Medal of the Biochemical Society, a Padma Shri from the Government of India, and election to the National Academy of Sciences.