Charles DeLisi

About

Charles DeLisi is an American Biomedical scientist who has made mathematical, computational, and experimental contributions to various areas of cell and systems biology including protein and DNA structure and function, gene regulation, cancer genetics, and immunology. His most recent publications have focused on climate change. He received a BA in History from the City College of New York and a PhD in Physics from NYU, followed by post-doctoral research in biophysical chemistry at Yale. DeLisi has held numerous prominent positions, including staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, senior investigator at NIH, and Founding Head of the Section on Theoretical Immunology at NCI, NIH. He was also the Director of the Department of Energy's Health and Environmental Research Programs and contributed to the development of one of the earliest databases of nucleic acid and protein sequences and structures. In 1986, he and colleagues proposed the concept of a reference human genome, which he successfully translated into policy. DeLisi served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomathematical Science at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and as Dean of Boston University’s College of Engineering. He proposed and obtained funding for the nation's first graduate program in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, which he chaired for over a decade. He was appointed the first Arthur Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering at Boston University until his retirement in 2024. His…

Research topics

• Biology
• Mathematics
• Geography
• Medicine
• Virology
• Philosophy
• Art history
• Demography
• Internal medicine
• Statistics

Selected publications

• The Role of Synthetic Biology in Atmospheric Greenhouse Gas Reduction: Prospects and Challenges

  BioDesign Research · 2020 · 49 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  produced by respiration into a stable carbonate, designing plants with an increased root-to-shoot ratio, and creating plants with the ability to self-fertilize. A number of serious ecological and societal challenges must, however, be confronted and resolved before any such application can be fully assessed, realized, and deployed.

  DOI

• Inferring microbial co-occurrence networks from amplicon data: a systematic evaluation

  mSystems · 2023-06-20 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  Microbes commonly organize into communities consisting of hundreds of species involved in complex interactions with each other. 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) amplicon profiling provides snapshots that reveal the phylogenies and abundance profiles of these microbial communities. These snapshots, when collected from multiple samples, can reveal the co-occurrence of microbes, providing a glimpse into the network of associations in these communities. However, the inference of networks from 16S data i…

  PublisherDOI

• Predictions for Europe for the Covid-19 pandemic from a SIR model

  medRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2020 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  of infection per contact, with higher temperatures associated with lower infectivity. Policy implications of our findings are also briefly discussed.

  DOI

• Analysis of Covid-19 Data for Eight European Countries and the United Kingdom Using a Simplified SIR Model

  Research Square (Research Square) · 2020 · 9 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Background: As the SARS-Cov-2/Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world, it is important to understanding the characteristics of its spread and possible correlates for control to develop strategies of response. Methods: Here we show how a simple Susceptible-Infective-Recovered (SIR) model applied to data for eight European countries and the United Kingdom (UK) can be used to forecast the descending limb (post-peak) of confirmed cases and deaths as a function of time, and predict the durati…

  DOI

• The Amphipathic Helix as a Structural Feature Involved in T-Cell Recognition

  2024-12-04 · 2 citations

  book-chapter

  The mammalian immune response to an invasion by a virus, bacteria, protozoa, or other foreign agent involves two distinct, but interdependent mechanisms referred to as humoral response and cellular response. In the humoral response, B cells release antibodies that attach to distinct binding sites on the proteins of the foreign agent, thus enabling phagocytic cells or complement to attach to and eliminate the foreign agent. A central character of antibody binding is that antibodies bind to foreig…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01GM080625

  NIH · $1.2M · 2011

• NIH Grant R21CA135882

  NIH · $447k · 2011

• Visant-Predictome: A System for Integration, Mining, Visualization and Analysis

  NIH · $3.0M · 2007–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Gyan Bhanot

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  79 shared

• Gabriela Alexe

  Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

  47 shared

• Zhenjun Hu

  40 shared

• James Cornette

  Iowa State University

  37 shared

• Gul S. Dalgin

  27 shared

• Shridar Ganesan

  Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey

  27 shared

• Jay A. Berzofsky

  National Institutes of Health

  26 shared

• Pablo Tamayo

  26 shared

Awards & honors

• Presidential Citizens Medal (President Clinton)
• Informa Clinical and Research Excellence Lifetime Achievemen…

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Pankaj Mehtah-73
• Marshall Van Alstyneh-56
• Daniel Segrèh-50