Eleazar Eskin

About

Eleazar Eskin is a Professor of Computer Science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, serving as the Department Chair of Computational Medicine. His research interests include bioinformatics, genetics, genomics, and machine learning. Eskin has contributed to the development of innovative COVID-19 testing technologies, including a $10 test capable of processing thousands of results in a day, which received FDA authorization. He earned his PhD from Columbia University in 2002 and has been recognized with awards such as the Okawa Foundation Research Award in 2008 and a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009. Eskin's work focuses on applying computational methods to biological and medical challenges, advancing the fields of genomics and personalized medicine.

Research topics

• Genetics
• Biology
• Computer Science
• Computational biology
• Data science
• Medicine
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Algorithm
• Evolutionary biology

Selected publications

• The GTEx Consortium atlas of genetic regulatory effects across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 5682 citations

  The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project was established to characterize genetic effects on the transcriptome across human tissues and to link these regulatory mechanisms to trait and disease associations. Here, we present analyses of the version 8 data, examining 15,201 RNA-sequencing samples from 49 tissues of 838 postmortem donors. We comprehensively characterize genetic associations for gene expression and splicing in cis and trans, showing that regulatory associations are found for alm…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The impact of sex on gene expression across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 703 citations

  Many complex human phenotypes exhibit sex-differentiated characteristics. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying these differences remain largely unknown. We generated a catalog of sex differences in gene expression and in the genetic regulation of gene expression across 44 human tissue sources surveyed by the Genotype-Tissue Expression project (GTEx, v8 release). We demonstrate that sex influences gene expression levels and cellular composition of tissue samples across the human body. A t…

  DOI

• Cell type–specific genetic regulation of gene expression across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 583 citations

  The Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project has identified expression and splicing quantitative trait loci in cis (QTLs) for the majority of genes across a wide range of human tissues. However, the functional characterization of these QTLs has been limited by the heterogeneous cellular composition of GTEx tissue samples. We mapped interactions between computational estimates of cell type abundance and genotype to identify cell type-interaction QTLs for seven cell types and show that cell type-…

  DOI

• Determinants of telomere length across human tissues

  Science · 2020 · 486 citations

  Telomere shortening is a hallmark of aging. Telomere length (TL) in blood cells has been studied extensively as a biomarker of human aging and disease; however, little is known regarding variability in TL in nonblood, disease-relevant tissue types. Here, we characterize variability in TLs from 6391 tissue samples, representing >20 tissue types and 952 individuals from the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project. We describe differences across tissue types, positive correlation among tissue typ…

  DOI

• Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation: the second round of challenges

  Nature Methods · 2022 · 390 citations

  Evaluating metagenomic software is key for optimizing metagenome interpretation and focus of the Initiative for the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI). The CAMI II challenge engaged the community to assess methods on realistic and complex datasets with long- and short-read sequences, created computationally from around 1,700 new and known genomes, as well as 600 new plasmids and viruses. Here we analyze 5,002 results by 76 program versions. Substantial improvements were seen…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Undergraduate Research Experience in Neuropsychiatric Genomics

  NIH · $429k · 2016–2021

• Collaborative Research: Design and Analysis of Compressed Sensing DNA Microarrays

  NSF · $300k · 2007–2011

• III: Medium: Meta-analysis reinterpreted using causal graphs

  NSF · $1.1M · 2013–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Yi Zhang

  Hubei University of Arts and Science

  186 shared

• Serghei Mangul

  University of Southern California

  92 shared

• Buhm Han

  Seoul National University

  89 shared

• Farhad Hormozdiari

  Google (United States)

  82 shared

• Chun Ye

  Gladstone Institutes

  82 shared

• Daniel T. O’Connor

  University of California, Davis

  78 shared

• Fangwen Rao

  The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center

  76 shared

• Caroline M. Nievergelt

  University of California, San Diego

  68 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2003

• M.S., Computer Science

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1999

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1998

Awards & honors

• Okawa Foundation Research Award - 2008
• Sloan Research Fellowship - 2009

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

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• Wei Wangh-91
• Stefano Soattoh-83