Olivier Elemento, Ph.D., is the Director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine (EIPM), Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Associate Director of the Institute for Computational Biomedicine, and Associate Program Director of the Clinical & Translational Science Center.
Dr. Elemento received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from University Paul Sabatier, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from INSA Toulouse, a master’s degree in intelligent systems from the University of Paris, and a doctorate in computational biology from the University of Montpellier/CNRS, all in France. He completed postdoctoral training at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University and joined Weill Cornell Medicine’s faculty in 2008. Dr. Elemento is the recipient of several awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the Hirschl Trust Career Scientist Award, the Walter B Wriston Award, the Daedalus Award.
Dr. Elemento being a world-renowned computational biologist led the development the first New York State approved whole exome sequencing test for oncology and also developed new methods for assessing tumor-driving pathways, the immune landscape of tumors and predicting immunotherapy responders. Moreover, Dr. Elemento developed methodologies to repurpose existing drugs to target specific pathways, predict drug toxicity and identify synergistic drug combinations combining Big Data with experimentation and genomic profiling to accelerate the discovery of cancer cures. Dr. Elemento has published over 150 scientific papers in the area of genomics, epigenomics, computational biology and drug discovery. He has also lead the team that developed augmented reality approaches for visualizing complex biomedical information. Dr. Elemento is an avid believer in mentoring as he mentored over 15 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, several of which have become faculty members. In 2016 two of his graduate students were awarded as 2 of the 30 under 30 in Healthcare by Forbes Magazine.
Under Dr. Elemento’s leadership EIPM’s primary mission is to uncover the molecular roots of disease using genomic sequencing, informatics, and other technologies, empowering WCM investigators to expand their research focus, taking the precision medicine methodology they pioneered in cancer and applying it to other areas of research including cardiovascular disease, lung disease, diabetes and neurological disease.