Yaniv Erlich (

Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...

: יניב ארליך) is an

Israeli-American Israeli Americans () are Americans who are of full or partial Israeli descent. The Israeli-American community, while predominantly Jewish, also includes various ethnic and religious minorities reflective of Israel's diverse demographics. This c ...

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

. He formerly served as an Associate Professor of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

and was the Chief Science Officer of

MyHeritage MyHeritage is an online genealogy platform with web, mobile, and Genealogy software, software products and services, introduced by the Israeli company MyHeritage in 2003. Users of the platform can obtain their family trees, upload and browse thro ...

. Erlich's work combines

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

genomics Genomics is an interdisciplinary field of molecular biology focusing on the structure, function, evolution, mapping, and editing of genomes. A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes as well as its hierarchical, ...

Biography

Dr. Erlich was born in

Israel Israel, officially the State of Israel, is a country in West Asia. It Borders of Israel, shares borders with Lebanon to the north, Syria to the north-east, Jordan to the east, Egypt to the south-west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Isr ...

. He earned BSc in Brain Sciences in 2006 from

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) is a Public university, public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Located in northwest Tel Aviv, the university is the center of teaching and ...

and a PhD in bioinformatics in 2010 from

Watson School of Biological Sciences The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences, formerly known as the Watson School of Biological Sciences (WSBS) until 2020, is a biological sciences graduate school at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The school was opened in 19 ...

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, botany, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is located in Laurel Hollow, New York, in Nassau County, on ...

. From 2010 to 2015, Erlich was a Fellow at the

Whitehead Institute Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indep ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

. From 2015 to 2019, he led a lab at

in computational genomics. From 2020 to present, he has served as CEO of Eleven Therapeutics.

Scientific work

Crowd sourcing genomic information

Erlich's team published a study in the journal

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

that reported crowd-sourcing of tens of millions of genealogical records from the website Geni.com. The team was able to create a single family tree of 13 million people that are all connected and spans tens of generations and over 600 years of history. The study used the data to analyze the genetics of longevity and familial dispersion In a different line of studies, Erlich and

Joseph Pickrell Joseph is a common male name, derived from the Hebrew (). "Joseph" is used, along with "Josef (given name), Josef", mostly in English, French and partially German languages. This spelling is also found as a variant in the languages of the mode ...

put together a website called DNA.Land to crowd source genomic datasets of participants of consumer genomics. The website collected over 130,000 datasets by November 2018.

Genetic Privacy

The Erlich group published several studies on the subject of

genetic privacy Genetic privacy involves the concept of personal privacy concerning the storing, repurposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to one's genetic information. This concept also encompasses privacy regarding the abi ...

. In 2013, they reported the possibility of recovering the

surname In many societies, a surname, family name, or last name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family. It is typically combined with a given name to form the full name of a person, although several give ...

of a male from his allegedly anonymous genomic dataset, which can lead to tracing his full identity. The technique exploits the co-inheritance of surnames and Y-chromosomes in most societies. Thus, by comparing the

Y-chromosome The Y chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes in therian mammals and other organisms. Along with the X chromosome, it is part of the XY sex-determination system, in which the Y is the sex-determining chromosome because the presence of the Y ...

of the person of interest to genetic genealogy databases of Y-chromosomes, it is possible in some cases to infer the surname. The team estimated that 12% of males in the US are subject to successful surname recovery. The team also demonstrated that after recovering the surname, basic demographic identifiers such as age and state of residency can permit tracing back the identity of the individual. To demonstrate the power of technique, they recover the identity of multiple 1000 Genomes by surname inference. In 2014, Erlich and

Arvind Narayanan Arvind Narayanan is a computer scientist and a professor at Princeton University. Narayanan is recognized for his research in the de-anonymization of data. He is currently the director of Princeton University, Princeton's Center for Information ...

published a survey of hacking techniques to genomic datasets. They predicted that autosomal searches in

GEDmatch GEDmatch is a public website and online service with DNA and genealogy tools for comparing autosomal DNA in personal family research and for law enforcement in forensic investigative research. Users upload their DNA data files from various gen ...

can be used to trace back the identity of anonymous people once the GEDmatch user base will reach a certain size, which indeed happened in 2018, where the website used to capture the

Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. (born November 8, 1945) is an American serial killer known as the Golden State Killer, the Original Night Stalker, and the East Area Rapist, who committed at least 13 murders and numerous rapes and burglaries ...

. In 2018, the Erlich team published a study in Science that reported that about 60% of US individuals of European descent have at least a 3rd cousin match in GEDmatch, which can theoretically permit their identification. In two to three years, virtually any person in this ethnic group can be theoretically traced using this technique, if the current rate of growth in GEDmatch will continue. The team suggested a cryptographic signature technique to reduce the chance of misusing direct to consumer websites by police searches.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Erlich, Yaniv Columbia University faculty American people of Israeli descent Tel Aviv University alumni Living people American computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people)