Anthony Gitter

Anthony Gitter grew up in Wisconsin, but that wasn’t the main reason he returned to his home state for a joint faculty appointment at UW–Madison and the Morgridge Institute. As a computational biologist, he is motivated to do collaborative, intellectually stimulating work that benefits society while advancing frontiers of knowledge. This unique faculty position offered him the opportunity to “be the researcher I wanted to be.”

Gitter designs novel computational methods to study diseases, particularly viral infections and cancer, and develop new drugs and proteins. A core problem in biology is understanding how cells respond to changes. Gitter’s team creates algorithms to trace messages passed between networks of biomolecules within cells; for example, to understand what happens when human cells are infected with viruses. His lab also develops machine learning models to dramatically speed up the process of drug discovery, collaborating with domain scientists to target the most promising chemicals for lab experiments.

Open science and open source are part of the Gitter Lab’s culture, and his team openly shares the data, code, and software they’ve developed. To build trust in AI and machine learning, Gitter believes that open, transparent practices are critically important.

“It’s easy to fall into the trap of producing new ideas and new computational methods that get further disconnected form the real needs of domain scientists. We always try to stay connected to the domain scientists and work with the many great people right here on this campus who are working on the early stages of drug discovery.”