It is a joint position, one that aims to bridge the strong computer‐science communities at Columbia with the Genome Center's focused efforts on translating genomic research into patient care. Erlich is a former Fellow at MIT's Whitehead Institute, where he created DNA Sudoku, a sequencing strategy to find rare genetic variations, and lobSTR, a short tandem repeat profiler for personal genomes, while also constructing a genealogy tree linking 13 million people. Has a PhD in genomics and bioinformatics from Watson School of Biological Sciences