Niles Pierce

Niles A. Pierce is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Bioengineering and Executive Officer for Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. A valedictorian at Princeton University, he earned a B.S.E. in 1993 and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1997. Pierce arrived at Caltech as a Senior Postdoctoral Scholar in Computational Molecular Biology in 1998. He joined the faculty as Assistant Professor in 2000, advancing to Associate Professor in 2006, Professor in 2010, and MacArthur Professor in 2024. His administrative roles include Acting Executive Officer for Biology and Biological Engineering in 2007 and Executive Officer from 2007 to 2013 and 2020 to present.

Pierce's research centers on biological engineering, chemical engineering, computational mathematics, molecular programming, chemical biology, and synthetic biology. He engineers small conditional DNAs and RNAs for signal transduction in vitro, in situ, and in vivo, and develops computational algorithms for nucleic acid system analysis and design to create programmable molecular instruments for cell state readout and regulation. As a co-founder of dynamic nucleic acid nanotechnology and molecular programming, his lab's hybridization chain reaction (HCR) platform for multiplexed, quantitative bioimaging and NUPACK software suite for nucleic acid analysis and design are utilized by thousands worldwide. Key publications include "Triggered amplification by hybridization chain reaction" (2004), "A synthetic DNA walker for molecular transport" (2004), "Thermodynamic analysis of interacting nucleic acid strands" (2007), "Programming biomolecular self-assembly pathways" (2008), "NUPACK: Analysis and design of nucleic acid systems" (2011), "Multiplexed miRNA northern blots via hybridization chain reaction" (2016), and "High-performance allosteric conditional guide RNAs for mammalian cell-selective regulation of CRISPR/Cas" (2021). His honors encompass the Rhodes Scholarship and Hertz and NSF Fellowships (1993), NSF CAREER Award (2005), Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2003), Guggenheim Fellowship (2014–2015), Rozenberg Tulip Award (2020), and Eastman Professorship at Oxford (2016–2017).