Jan O. Korbel

Jan O. Korbel (born 1975) is a German scientist working in the fields of Human Genetics, Genomics and Computational Biology. He is a tenured principal investigator and Head of Data Science at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Heidelberg, Germany, and one of the co-directors jointly heading the Molecular Medicine Partnership Unit (MMPU) of the EMBL and the Medical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. 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.[1]

After receiving his PhD in 2005 from Humboldt University of Berlin, he pursued his postdoctoral research at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (USA).

In addition to his research activities, Jan Korbel is promoting interdisciplinary dialogues in Bioethics,[2] and the application of genome sequencing in Genomic Medicine.[3] He received several academic prizes including the Chica and Heinz Schaller Research Award (2014),[4] the Manfred-Fuchs-Prize for his bioethical research (2015),[5] the 2018 HMLS Investigator Award,[6] and the Pezcoller Foundation–EACR Cancer Researcher Award (2018).[7] He is an elected member of Germany's National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina[8] (2015) and of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)[9] (2016). Jan Korbel is also a European Research Council (ERC) investigator.[10]