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 Genome Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Mootha leads a research team dedicated to mitochondrial biology.

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 team includes biologists, computer scientists, clinicians that work together to investigate mitochondrial bioenergetics in health and in disease. His work has led to the full characterization of the mitochondrial proteome, identification of dozens of disease genes, and discovery of all the components of the mitochondrial calcium uniporter.  He and his team have developed computational tools that are now widely used in biomedical research.

Dr. Mootha has received a number of honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Judson Daland Prize of the American Philosophical Society, the Keilin Medal of the Biochemical Society, a Padma Shri from the Government of India, and election to the National Academy of Sciences.