Words by Alison Cooley
Senior Communications Manager, Health Sciences
When Andrej Savol went off to college, he seemed to be charting his own path. He moved from the Seattle area in Washington state all the way to Pittsburgh. And he planned to study music, a field quite divergent from his father’s career in engineering and his mother’s studies in education. But his life ended up mirroring his parents’ life in many meaningful ways—including finding love in the Steel City.
Career Parallels
Savol decided to attend the University of Pittsburgh because he was awarded a scholarship, and Pitt came highly recommended from his father, A. Martin Savol (ENGR ’75G, ’77G), and his mother, Toni E. Savol (EDUC ’69G), who both earned degrees there. Savol not only earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in music but also graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in applied mathematics from the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences. He became a Pitt alumnus—just like his parents.
When Savol was growing up, he learned about his father’s research in medical imaging, which exposed him to the research environment. After graduation, those interests called to him, and he began to investigate PhD programs. He became enchanted by the idea of applying his mathematical and quantitative skills to biology after learning about the Joint Carnegie Mellon – University of Pittsburgh Computational Biology PhD Program.
“That program deserves high praise,” he said. “It began about 20 years ago, and today ‘computational biology’ is a recognized discipline/scientific domain and career path. There was a lot of foresight when that program was put together.”
Shortly after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine with a PhD in computational biology, Savol began working in the industry as a bioinformatics specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he learned analysis methods for next-generation sequencing data. And he was able to apply that knowledge subsequently to improve cancer diagnostics at Foundation Medicine, Inc., where he is now a director of computational biology informatics.
In addition to working at Foundation Medicine, Savol also works part-time as a bioinformatics lecturer and mentor to junior scientists at the Department of Bioinformatics at Northeastern University.
And this past January, he got the opportunity to work with current Pitt PhD students—he shared his professional journey with them during a PhD Pathways presentation.
Savol has become a scientific leader as well as an expert in oncology genomics, gene expression and epigenetic analysis methods. He is grateful to Pitt for the education he received. “I really feel my education at Pitt was top notch, and it’s almost like part of a pipeline for sending really skilled and capable computational biologists into positions that need that expertise,” he said.
Personal Parallels
Just like his parents, Savol also found love in Pittsburgh. He and Virginia “Ginny” Burger (MED ’13) attended classes together as computational biology graduate students in the same cohort and soon discovered they both had undergraduate mathematical degrees. Their common interests brought them together.
They were married shortly after graduating from Pitt Medicine, and they now live in Boston, Massachusetts, a biotech hub, where they often run into former classmates.
Although the two are not in competition with one another, “It’s fun having a family member who knows the business,” Savol said.
And these Pitt PhD sweethearts will soon be starting a new chapter of their lives—they are expecting their first child this Valentine’s Day!
Fun Facts
When Savol is not working on sequence analysis, he still pursues his love of music. He plays the piano and sings in a Renaissance choir, Convivium Musicum in Boston. He studied piano performance at Mannes School of Music in New York, and he sang in his first a cappella choir, The Pittsburgh Compline Choir, during his time at Pitt.