News Brief: Mihaela Pertea named ISCB Fellow

Mihaela Pertea, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of biomedical engineering and genetic medicine, has been named a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). 

A leading professional organization for computational biology and bioinformatics, ISCB recognized Pertea for her pioneering contributions to transcriptome assembly, most notably as creator of StringTie, a groundbreaking tool that redefined the field when it launched in 2015. StringTie outperforms existing methods in accuracy while operating 40 times faster and with dramatically lower memory requirements—turning days of computation into minutes. By ingeniously adapting maximum flow optimization to RNA-seq assembly, Pertea introduced a mathematical framework previously unapplied to the field.

The impact has been extraordinary: her StringTie papers have accumulated over 18,000 citations and the software is used by more than 75,000 researchers worldwide. Her contributions span 25 years, from developing the first computational gene finder for the malaria parasite early in her career to leading the CHESS human gene annotation database, which used StringTie to synthesize 10,000 RNA-seq experiments into a comprehensive human gene catalog. 

Pertea and the other 2026 Fellows will be formally recognized during ISMB 2026, ISCB’s flagship conference, in Washington, D.C., July 12-16. Read the society’s full announcement here.