Mauricio Carneiro was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His interest in computer science began at an early age, and he soon found himself immersed in developing games, and competing in computer science contests. Some of his fondest memories were competing in the International Collegiate Programming Contest during college, where he was honored to win as South American Champion in 2003.

For his masters, he pursued research in computer graphics but soon became drawn to the computational problems inherent in biology. He chose to pursue a Masters of Science in molecular epidemiology, at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied the evolutionary dynamics of HIV and transposable elements. For his PhD at Harvard University, he drew on his computational background to develop a method for understanding the dynamics of drug resistance in the malaria parasite. In addition, he worked on the annotation and analysis of the first Drosophila mauritiana genome. Finally, he helped to develop a mathematical model for the evolution of gene networks.

Upon the completion of his PhD, Dr. Carneiro joined the Medical and Population Genetics Program at the Broad, where he began his career as a Computational Biologist. Today, Dr. Carneiro is a Group Lead in Computational Technology Development. His group's goal is to optimize and apply computational analytics to DNA sequencing data including but not limited to human data. At the Broad, his major contribution has been developing a software compendium known as the Genome Analysis Toolkit (GATK), which is freely available to the scientific community. This new mathematical framework is used by scientists at the Broad, and the world, to validate findings of common and rare variants in diseases like diabetes, autism, and cancer.

Dr. Carneiro's passion continues to be leading technology development in genome sequencing and analysis, and helping to analyze and identify new sequencing technologies which have the potential to transform our understanding of human health.