Randall Ellis, PhD

Randall “Randy” Ellis received his PhD at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai researching the neuropathophysiological mechanisms underlying opioid use disorder. Applying techniques from biomedical informatics, genomics, machine learning, and behavioral/molecular neuroscience, his work focused on opioid exposure as a risk factor for neurocognitive disease, as well as the identification of gene targets with direct behavioral relevance in animal models of opioid use disorder. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, he is investigating physiological risk factors for aging and neurodegenerative disease for the purpose of identifying novel medical, environmental, and other interventions that can be used to delay and/or reverse aging in the brain. These efforts encompass the integration of large-scale human biobanks including behavioral, genomic, neuroimaging, and various other data sources to identify replicable and robust findings relevant to human brain health. Leveraging his expertise in biomedical informatics, causal inference, multiverse analysis, and metascience, Randy aims to discover clinically actionable signals in human data, test them in collaboration with experimental labs, and impact real-world clinical and public health practice for the benefit of the global community.