Alexis Battle is the director of the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, the interim co-director of the Johns Hopkins Data Science and AI Institute, and a professor of biomedical engineering and computer science with a secondary appointment in the Department of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. A 2016 Searle Scholar, she specializes in unlocking the secrets and function of the human genome by analyzing large-scale genomic sequencing data to understand the impact of genetic variation on the human body.
Battle’s research concentrates on the development of computational biology tools, statistical methods, and machine learning strategies to examine how genetic differences contribute to differences in health, from cellular-level changes and gene regulation to disease outcomes. A leading member of the National Institutes of Health’s Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) Consortium, she focuses on predicting the effects of variation in noncoding DNA sequences. Findings of her work on a GTEx project, which studied how genetic patterns lead to molecular changes within specific tissues, were published in a 2017 issue of the journal Nature.
At JHU’s “Battle Lab,” her research also includes the development of new methods to evaluate and predict the impact of personal genomics and rare genetic variants that may significantly affect an individual’s health—work that could significantly improve our ability to diagnose rare diseases. These methods are helping to enhance our understanding of how genes work together and how their interconnected pathways may influence complex traits.
Battle is involved in a host of additional ongoing research initiatives, from building integrative networks for the genomic analysis of autism, supported by the NIH, to predicting rare Mendelian disease variants using genomic data, funded by her Searle Scholar Award Grant and a 2017 Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award. She is also the recipient of a 2019 Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, a 2019 Johns Hopkins Discovery Award for studying the genetics of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, and a 2022 President’s Frontier Award. She holds several patents and has authored more than 60 articles in publications including Science, eLife, Circulation, the American Journal of Human Genetics, Genome Biology, Genome Research, and PLOS Genetics.
Battle received her formal education from Stanford University, where she earned a BS in 2003 and an MS and PhD in computer science in 2013. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford before joining Johns Hopkins in 2014. Prior to her career in academia, Battle was a staff software engineer and manager for Google.