Vamsi Krishna Mootha BS, MD

Vamsi Mootha is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a Professor of Systems Biology and of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His laboratory is based in the Department of Molecular Biology and Center for Human Genetic Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Mootha leads a research team dedicated to fundamental mitochondrial biology and disease.

Dr. Mootha received his B.S. (with honors, with distinction) in Mathematical and Computational Science at Stanford University. He then received his M.D. (cum laude) from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, where his thesis research focused on mitochondrial energetics. Following an internship and residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he pursued postdoctoral training in genomics at the Whitehead Institute.

His research group consists of clinicians, computer scientists, and biologists, who work collaboratively to elucidate the network properties of mitochondria, and how these properties go awry in human disease. His work has led to the discovery of over one dozen Mendelian mitochondrial disease genes, to the discovery that mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with the common form of type 2 diabetes mellitus, and to the discovery of the molecular identity of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter. His team has also developed generic, computational tools that have been widely used in biomedical research.