On July 1, 2020, Madan Babu joined the Faculty of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital as the endowed chair in Biological Data Science in the Structural Biology Department and Director of the Center of Excellence for Data Driven Discovery. Dr. Babu also holds a position as an adjunct professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Southern Denmark.
Dr. Babu is a pioneer in data science – based approaches to revealing fundamental principles in biological systems. He has developed state-of-the-art computational and machine learning-based methods to interrogate large-scale biological data from diverse organisms.
His recent work on GPCRs explains why people respond differently to certain drugs, which has direct implications for personalized and precision medicine. Working with the Mandrup and Kornfeld groups, his group analyzes the metabolic pathways and miRNA-gene regulatory networks contributing to differences in signaling and metabolism within healthy and obese adipocytes.