Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the former[2] editor-in-chief of the journal eLife.

Brown) - 2015 [13]After earning his doctorate, Eisen was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in the lab of David Botstein, where he most notably developed a method for interpreting gene expression data from microarrays.

[15] When Eisen lived in Tennessee he worked as a play-by-play announcer for a minor league baseball team,[12] the Columbia Mules.

[11] He and computational biologist James Fraser recorded a video for iBiology about the role baseball statistics influenced their research.

[16] In a lecture in 2015, Eisen stated that he received a computer from his grandfather for his twelfth birthday and spent the next five years teaching himself how to program so that he could keep track of baseball stats.

For example, his 5 most cited papers cover a broad range of topics including methods for hierarchical clustering,[17] applications to human breast cancers (with David Botstein and Charles Perou),[6] and discovery of tumor subtypes in diffuse large B cell lymphoma (with Ash Alizadeh and Louis Staudt).

[18] His more recent research work has been on fruit flies and Drosophila[21] and how they "develop from a tiny single-celled egg to a mature adult.

Eisen's reasons for running for Congress included his perception that the Trump administration was unresponsive to climate change and other science-related issues.

Another reason Eisen decided to run was his experience watching Cabinet appointees being interviewed by the Senate about climate change.

[24][25] Also in 2020, Eisen was involved in the story surrounding the death from SARS-CoV-2 of an anonymous queer Hopi female professor with whom he had interacted on Twitter.

[29] The post prompted some criticism, including from Israeli researchers who asked colleagues to avoid publishing in eLife as long as he was editor.

The chair of eLife’s board asked Eisen to delete his Twitter post, but he refused to do so "because that would be capitulating to what I thought was a really misdirected effort to silence any expression of support of Palestinians".

The petition, which was signed by over 2,000 scientists, academics and researchers, said eLife's action is having a "chilling effect" on freedom of expression in academia.

[25] An eLife spokesperson clarified in an email to The Hindu, saying “We value and respect everyone’s right to freedom of speech including political expression and the legal right to protest.

Particularly for those in leadership positions, exercising that right comes with responsibilities: an expectation to show good judgement and a duty of care to the communities they serve.

We don’t believe those qualities have been demonstrated.”[31] In eLife’s 2023 annual report, the Chair of the Board of Directors said: “In October, we parted ways with our Editor-in-Chief, Michael Eisen, and want to acknowledge the extraordinary vision and leadership he provided to eLife, which is allowing us to build on his legacy as we grow our publishing model.”[32] On November 10, 2023, in response to a tweet saying “How to make faculty meeting more exciting?

Wrong answers only.”, Eisen tweeted “Sit me next to Randy Schekman.”, indicating an ongoing personal conflict with the preceding editor-in-chief.

In 2012 Eisen began protesting against the Research Works Act as part of his appeal to promote open access to information.