Robert Piskol

Biography
Robert Piskol, Ph.D., is a computational biologist and oncology drug-discovery leader at Genentech, where he works within gRED Computational Sciences. His work combines large-scale molecular data, quantitative modeling, and translational biology to identify disease mechanisms, biomarkers, and therapeutic opportunities. He has contributed to studies using genomics, transcriptomics, single-cell data, and functional models to understand tumor biology and treatment response, including recent research on cell states that drive metastatic dissemination in colorectal cancer. Before moving into oncology drug discovery, Dr. Piskol conducted research on RNA biology and RNA editing, including work at Stanford that helped characterize how endogenous double-stranded RNA is distinguished from viral RNA by the innate immune system. He earned his Ph.D. at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he studied structural and population-genetic determinants of RNA evolution. His current work focuses on integrating computational analysis with experimental oncology so that complex datasets can produce testable mechanisms and drug-development decisions.