Rate My Professor Charles Danko

Charles Danko is an Associate Professor in Life Science and Technology at the Baker Institute for Animal Health in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. He earned a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2003, a PhD in Bioinformatics from SUNY Upstate Medical University in 2009, and completed postdoctoral training in Genomics and Bioinformatics at Cornell University in 2009. Danko joined the Cornell faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021. He previously held positions as a graduate student and software developer at SUNY Upstate Medical University and as a research assistant at the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

Danko’s research examines how gene expression patterns are encoded in DNA sequences and how these patterns influence evolution, development, and disease. His work integrates molecular biology techniques with computational approaches, including statistical modeling and machine learning, to study transcriptional regulatory elements, enhancers, and transcription factors. Key contributions include studies on nascent RNA analysis, gene regulation in cancer cells such as glioblastoma, evolutionary differences in gene expression across primates, and methods like GRO-seq and ChRO-seq for identifying active regulatory elements. He has received awards including a PhRMA Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biological Informatics and a T32 Fellowship in Reproductive Genomics. Danko holds the Robert N. Noyce Assistant Professorship in Life Sciences and Technology.