Eran Segal, PhD

Professor of Computational Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science · InsideTracker

Computational biologist behind the Personalized Nutrition Project — the microbiome and glucose-response research that defined biomarker-driven nutrition

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Eran Segal, PhD portrait

About

Eran Segal, PhD is Professor of Computational Biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and a member of InsideTracker's Scientific Advisory Board. Trained in computer science at Tel Aviv University and a PhD from Stanford under Daphne Koller, he has been on the Weizmann faculty since 2005, building quantitative models of gene regulation, microbiome biology, and personalized medicine. His 2015 Cell paper with colleagues — showing that glucose responses to identical foods vary substantially between people — became the foundational study for biomarker- and microbiome-driven nutrition and led him to co-found DayTwo with Dr. Eran Elinav. Since 2018 he has run the Human Phenotype Project, a 25-year cohort study with 28,000+ participants as of 2025.

What to Know

Signature approach

Segal's research stack reads as the intellectual antecedent to consumer biomarker analytics platforms. Build deep multi-modal datasets — blood, microbiome, continuous glucose, imaging, lifestyle — and apply quantitative models to surface individual variation that population-average advice misses. The Personalized Nutrition Project showed glucose responses to identical foods diverge widely person-to-person; the ongoing Human Phenotype Project scales the same logic across 17 body systems and 28,000+ participants on a 25-year horizon.

What sets them apart

  • Foundational personalized-nutrition paper. The 2015 Cell study (Zeevi, Korem, Zmora, Segal et al.) is the most-cited paper proving food-response heterogeneity — the empirical premise behind the personalized-nutrition category.
  • Citation weight that's unusual for an advisory board. 88,000+ citations, h-index 118 on Google Scholar, Overton Prize (2007), EMBO Member (2015), three ERC grants, and a peer-reviewed publication record spanning Cell, Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, and Nature Reviews Genetics.
  • Operates the cohort, not just the lab. The Human Phenotype Project is an active 25-year longitudinal study he founded — most longevity advisors cite research; Segal generates it.

Affiliations

Scientific Advisor

Thought Leadership

Media Appearances

Notable Collaborators

  • Daphne Koller · PhD doctoral advisor, Stanford University — probabilistic models for genomic data
  • Eran Elinav · Weizmann Institute immunologist; co-founder of DayTwo and lead collaborator on the Personalized Nutrition Project
  • Jonathan Widom · Northwestern University; co-author on the 2006 Nature paper modeling nucleosome positioning along DNA

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