Ryan E. Mills

Ryan Mills is a Professor in the Gilbert S. Omenn Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan Medical School, where he also serves as Associate Chair of Research and Program Director of DCMB Computing Infrastructure.

Mills earned his A.B. from Wabash College before completing his M.S. and Ph.D. in Bioinformatics at the Georgia Institute of Technology under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Borodovsky. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics and genomics at Emory University under Dr. Scott Devine, followed by a research position in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School under Charles Lee, where he also led the Bioinformatics and Medical Diagnostics Team within the Molecular Genetic Research Unit. He joined the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in 2012.

The Mills laboratory develops and implements computational methods to precisely identify, resolve, and analyze genomic variation both between and within individuals. His current work is focused on discovering and characterizing somatic genomic variation in individual cells and tissues, with an emphasis on complex and repetitive sequences including mobile elements, short tandem repeats, nuclear mitochondrial insertions as well as human papillomavirus (HPV) integration in head and neck cancers. His research has been conducted independently and through participation in large consortia including the 1000 Genomes Project, the Brain Somatic Mosaicism Network, and the Somatic Mosaicism across Human Tissues (SMaHT) Network.