Affiliation: Genentech

Mikaela Koutrouli is a computational biologist specializing in single-cell and spatial omics, machine learning, and large-scale biological data integration. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Computational Sciences Center of Excellence at Genentech, where she develops computational methods for optical pooled CRISPR screens, imaging-based perturbation biology, and multi-omics integration. In parallel, she serves as the Steering Council and core member of scverse, a global open-source ecosystem for single-cell analysis with over one million monthly downloads, where she has helped build an international developer community and establish collaborations across academia and industry.

Her research focuses on functional genomics, biological networks, deep learning, and scalable analysis of datasets containing hundreds of millions of cells. Mikaela is a core contributor to the STRING database and the developer of FAVA, a framework for functional network inference. She has authored more than 25 peer-reviewed publications, accumulated over 11,300 citations, and regularly speaks at leading international genomics and computational biology conferences.