Daniel Park, Ph.D.

Daniel J. 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 institute member Pardis Sabeti, Park 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.

Park earned his Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 2013, where he developed and utilized computational tools to identify adaptations in the malaria parasite, P. falciparum, that allow it to evade modern drugs and global eradication efforts. He has expertise in evolutionary biology, next-generation sequence analysis, software engineering, high throughput computing, education, and communication. Park joined the Broad in 2006, and was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation in 2010.