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Debora S. Marks is Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. She is a computational biologist whose research focuses on developing algorithmic approaches to interpret genetic variation and its effects on biological systems and clinical medicine. Marks earned an undergraduate degree in medicine from the University of Bristol, followed by a mathematics degree from the University of Manchester. She completed a PhD in computational biology at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2010 under advisors Reinhart Heinrich and Hanspeter Herzl. Prior to her academic career, she worked in the pharmaceutical industry.
Marks joined Harvard Medical School as faculty and serves as an associate member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Her lab develops methods drawing from statistical physics and graphical modeling to predict protein structures, conformations, and interactions from evolutionary sequence data alone. This work has enabled predictions for membrane proteins and other challenging targets, with applications to variant interpretation, drug response, and synthetic protein design. She has also contributed to understanding microRNA regulation of gene expression. Marks received the Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology in 2016, the Ben Barres Early Career Award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in 2018, election as a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology in 2022, the inaugural Margot and Tom Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence in 2025, and election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2026.
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