Mark Sanborn is a biomedical researcher and the founder of HerpesChance. He holds a PhD in Biomedical Sciences, where his dissertation research focused on designing computational workflows to uncover transcriptional signatures and mechanisms of cellular senescence in health and disease. His PhD was centered on rigorous statistical methods for analyzing large-scale biological datasets.
Mark spent years working in viral genomics, pathogen surveillance using next-generation sequencing, and bioinformatics analysis at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. That experience with infectious disease data directly informed the approach behind HerpesChance, applying statistical modeling to publicly available CDC datasets to give people accessible, evidence-based risk estimates.
His research spans virology, genomics, bioinformatics, and computational biology. He has authored and co-authored 17+ peer-reviewed publications in journals including Nature, Nature Communications, Nature Cancer, Brain, Journal of Experimental Medicine, PNAS, and JCI Insight.
Mark also runs Sanbomics, an online bioinformatics tutorial channel that has reached over one million people.
PhD, Biomedical Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Medicine · 2025
Dissertation: Transcriptional signatures and mechanisms underlying cellular senescence in health and disease
BS, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
University of Maryland, Baltimore County · 2015
Disouky A, Sanborn MA, Sabitha KR, et al. Human hippocampal neurogenesis in adulthood, ageing and Alzheimer's disease. Nature. 2026. doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10169-4.
Sanborn MA, Wang X, Gao S, Dai Y, Rehman J. Unveiling the cell-type-specific landscape of cellular senescence through single-cell transcriptomics using SenePy. Nature Communications. 2025;16(1):1884.
Kim YM, Sanborn MA, Wang X, et al. Impaired Barrier Integrity of the Skeletal Muscle Vascular Endothelium Drives Progression of Cancer Cachexia. Nature Cancer. 2022.
Trevino TN, Fogel AB, Otkiran G, Niladhuri SB, Sanborn MA, et al. Engineered Wnt7a ligands rescue blood-brain barrier and cognitive deficits in a COVID-19 mouse model. Brain. 2024;147(5):1636–1643.
Chakraborty S, Singh A, Wang L, Wang X, Sanborn MA, et al. Trained immunity of alveolar macrophages enhances injury resolution via KLF4-MERTK-mediated efferocytosis. J Exp Med. 2023;220(11).
Wang X, Sanborn MA, Dai Y, Rehman J. Temporal transcriptomic analysis using TrendCatcher identifies early and persistent neutrophil activation in severe COVID-19. JCI Insight. 2022;7(4):e157255.
Sanborn MA, Wuertz KM, Kim HC, et al. Metagenomic analysis reveals Culex mosquito virome diversity and Japanese encephalitis genotype V in the Republic of Korea. Mol Ecol. 2021;30(21):5470–5487.
Sanborn MA, Li T, Victor K, et al. Analysis of cell-associated DENV RNA by oligo(dT) primed 5' capture scRNAseq. Sci Rep. 2020;10(1):9047.
View full publication list on PubMed →
HerpesChance combines Mark's expertise in bioinformatics, statistical modeling, and genomics to build evidence-based STD risk calculators trained on CDC NHANES data from over 44,000 participants. The site's models, articles, and methodology are written and maintained by Mark personally.
This website provides educational information only and does not provide diagnosis or treatment. For full technical details, see the Methodology page. See also our Medical Disclaimer.
HerpesChance is free for everyone and always will be. Running the servers, maintaining the models, and writing new content takes time and money. If you found this site helpful, consider supporting it.