Andrew Su, Ph.D., is the Elden and Verna Strahm Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology (ISCB). Dr. Su earned his PhD in chemistry at Scripps Research in 2002, and was the Associate Director of Bioinformatics at The Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) before returning to Scripps Research as a faculty member in 2011.
The Su lab focuses on building and applying bioinformatics tools and infrastructure for biomedical discovery. A core emphasis is the development of knowledge graphs — both centralized and federated — that integrate data across disparate biomedical resources. This work is exemplified by BioThings Explorer, which queries over 60 biomedical APIs to support drug repurposing and mechanistic discovery. The lab applies graph neural network approaches to knowledge graph reasoning, enabling link prediction and knowledge graph completion with applications to drug repurposing and disease mechanism inference. These computational tools have been applied across diverse disease areas, including rare diseases, osteoarthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, and type 1 diabetes. Most recently, the lab has extended this work into AI-assisted biomedical reasoning, including retrieval-augmented generation frameworks that combine federated knowledge retrieval with large language models. In all this work, the Su lab has embraced the principles of open science, open data, and open source software.
Andrew received his BA degrees in Chemistry, Computing and Information Systems, and Integrated Science from Northwestern University.