| Jan Korbel | |
| Birth Place: | Chêne-Bougeries, Switzerland |
| Nationality: | German |
| Field: | Human genetics & Computational biology |
| Work Institution: | European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) |
Jan O. Korbel (born 1975) is a German scientist working in the fields of human genetics, genomics and computational biology.
After receiving his PhD in 2005 from Humboldt University of Berlin, he pursued his postdoctoral research at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (USA).[1]
He is a tenured principal investigator and Heading the Data Science Centre at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg, Germany. He is also a senior scientist in the Genome Biology Unit at the EMBL, is leading a bridging research division at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), and is a honorary professor ("Honorarprofessor") at Heidelberg University. A particular focus of the Korbel group is on investigating a particular form of mutation, genomic structural variation, which includes deletions, inversions and more complex chromosomal rearrangements such as chromothripsis events that can occur in healthy individuals and in context of disease. His group's principal research objective is to understand genomic structural variations as a basis of phenotypic variation and cancer development.[2]
In addition to his research activities, Jan Korbel is promoting interdisciplinary dialogues in bioethics,[3] and the application of genome sequencing in Genomic Medicine.[4]
He received several academic prizes, including:
He is an elected member of Germany's National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina[9] (2015) and of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)[10] (2016). He is also a fellow of the European Academy of Cancer Sciences.[11] Jan Korbel is also a European Research Council (ERC) investigator.[12]