Danny Park is the Senior Group Leader for Viral Computational Genomics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he is an Institute Scientist. Under the direction of Pardis Sabeti, Danny leads the genomic analysis and development of computational methods for viral projects at the Broad, including work on Ebola, Lassa, and unidentified viral fevers, and directs the implementation of computational pipelines for analysis of viral genomic data, which is routinely utilized by academic and public health partners globally.
His work has focused, in particular, on epidemiological and public health inferences from viral genomes in the context of epidemic diseases, including Ebola, Zika, Mumps, Hepatitis A, and SARS-CoV-2. He pursues studies of pathogen genomes, focusing on questions ranging from pathogen evolution to drug resistance, disease transmission, and epidemiology. His work is both multidisciplinary and multi-institutional, and collaborates in NIH and CDC sponsored consortia both globally and domestically, with an emphasis on laboratory partners in West Africa and the northeastern US.
Danny originally worked with the Sabeti Lab as a software engineer at the Broad, then as a Harvard graduate student (with support from the National Science Foundation), where he earned his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. During this time, he developed and utilized computational tools to identify adaptations in the P. falciparum malaria parasite that allow it to evade modern drugs and global eradication efforts. Prior to the Broad, he spent four years at a microarray core facility at MGH, working as a bioinformatic consultant on the design and analysis of expression experiments. His bachelor’s and master’s degrees are in computer science from MIT, where he developed software tools for in silico protein design in the Keating Lab. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and two sons.
Follow his professional and research activities via his LinkedIn profile or his Twitter feed. Find a full list of his publications on Google Scholar.