Sylvain Costes

Sylvain Costes, Ph.D., is a principal investigator in the Space Biosciences Research Branch at NASA-ARC and the GeneLab Project Manager. Dr. Costes has spent his career leading multidisciplinary research in both academic and government scientific institutions. He is the project manager coordinating the systems biology scientific research effort for the GeneLab project, supporting both internal and external collaboration efforts and the lead of the Radiation Biophysics Laboratory.

Dr. Costes obtained his Ph.D. in the Nuclear Engineering Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied radiation biology. He then joined the mathematics department as a postdoctoral fellow where he developed mathematical formalisms predicting gene deletions observed after exposure to ionizing radiation. Dr. Costes served as a staff scientist at the Image Analysis and Confocal Laboratory of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, MD, where he expanded his research to include high throughput imaging, live cell imaging and biochemical models describing the interaction and movement of fluorescent proteins. He joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in 2004 where he led the computer modeling effort for a NASA Specialized Center of Research looking at the risk of Space Radiation on the human breast. This work was in collaboration with NYU Medical School, UCSF and Colorado State University. During his time at LBNL, he also supervised a bioinformatics lab for multi-dimensional microscope image analysis, agent-based modeling and genomic analysis. He also co-founded a startup in 2012, Exogen biotechnology Inc., a spinoff of the Berkeley Lab, dedicated to measure DNA damage in individuals and predicting cancer risk using DNA repair phenotypes.