Three Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering (BME) professors—Steven Salzberg, Mihaela Pertea, and Winston Timp—have been named to Clarivate’s 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list. This honor places them among the top 1 in 1,000 scientists and social scientists worldwide whose work has profoundly shaped the direction of global research.
The elite group of 6,868 researchers have demonstrated significant and broad influence in their respective field(s) of research and have authored multiple highly cited papers – research papers which rank in the top 1% by citations for their field(s) and publication year in the Web of Science over the past decade.
The three BME researchers on the list are leaders in computational biology and genomics, a field that uses advanced computer science and statistical methods to analyze massive biological data sets. Their collective influence stems from developing foundational, open-source software and technology that scientists globally use to interpret genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic data.
Key Contributions of the Highly Cited Faculty:
- Steven Salzberg, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Computational Biology and Genomics, was recognized for developing highly cited computational methods for DNA analysis. His team has developed and applied foundational software like Bowtie, HISAT, and Kraken to solve critical problems in gene finding, genome assembly, comparative genomics, and sequencing technology. Salzberg has been named to the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers list multiple times since its inception in 2001.
- Mihaela Pertea, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, has made significant contributions to transcriptome assembly and annotation, specifically through her widely adopted computational method, StringTie, which provides a more accurate way to reconstruct and quantify gene expression from RNA sequencing data.
- Winston Timp, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, is an expert in nanopore sequencing technology. His research integrates biophysics and molecular biology to develop new tools for the direct sequencing and characterization of epigenomes at the single-molecule level, offering deeper insights into gene regulation and disease diagnosis.