Daniel Jacobson, distinguished research scientist in the Biosciences Division at the Department of Energy’s 91°µÍř, has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, or AIMBE, for his achievements in computational biology.
Jacobson was recognized by AIMBE “for leading in pioneering new methods to utilize massive datasets and supercomputing for biological network analysis in diverse systems.” AIMBE Fellows represent the top 2% of medical and biological engineers in the nation, honoring those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering and medicine research, practice or education, and to the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology.
Jacobson’s team develops and deploys artificial intelligence on ORNL supercomputers to understand the complexities of genetic architecture and its impact on an organism’s traits and behaviors. His work spans an extraordinary range — from quantum chemistry of genomes and guide RNAs for improved CRISPR Cas9 genome editing tools, through every scale of biological hierarchy within an organism, to population-level dynamics, ecological interactions and planetary-scale computations. He and colleagues are developing methods combining AI, such as large language models, with network-based approaches tailored to handle the complex and diverse patterns in plant field and clinical studies.
This recognition is a testament to the transformative power of interdisciplinary collaboration and advancements in AI and computing that give us opportunities to address critical challenges in energy and human health.
His discoveries have focused on improvements to bioenergy feedstock crops, computational predictions for infectious disease and treatments, the molecular mechanisms of disease evolution and pandemic prevention and microbial innovations for biotechnology applications.
“I am honored to have been elected by my peers to the AIMBE College of Fellows,” Jacobson said. “This recognition is a testament to the transformative power of interdisciplinary collaboration and advancements in AI and computing that give us opportunities to address critical challenges in energy and human health.”
His team at ORNL was the first to break the exascale computing barrier on any scientific question by developing an algorithm to examine a genomic dataset for clues to opioid addiction and potential treatments. The work was performed on the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL, and won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize for supercomputing applications in 2018.
Jacobson’s contributions to supercomputing and biology have also been recognized with DOE’s Secretary of Energy Honor Award, HPCwire Editor’s Choice for Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement, a joint citation from DOE and the Department of Veteran Affairs, and multiple honors from ORNL, where he has played a key role in pushing the boundaries of computational science. Jacobson has 150 publications, an H-index of 40, and an i-10 index of 103. He holds several patents in areas ranging from infectious disease to novel approaches for mechanistic discovery in bacteria and plants.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit . —Stephanie Seay
