Dr. Adam Hansel has been honored with the 2026 Baylor College of Medicine Young Alumni Award for the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. View the full list of 2026 Awardees and Past Honorees here.
Dr. Adam Hansen is a computational geneticist and entrepreneur dedicated to advancing precision medicine. He is the founder and CEO of Geneial, a patient research platform that helps patients with rare diseases and researchers remain connected over time. His work sits at the intersection of genomics, artificial intelligence and healthcare innovation, with an emphasis on accelerating medical discovery while promoting responsible data sharing, patient privacy and individual agency.
Dr. Hansen earned his Bachelor of Science in bioinformatics from Brigham Young University and his Doctor of Philosophy in molecular and human genetics from Baylor College of Medicine in 2020. During his doctoral training in Baylor’s Human Genome Sequencing Center under Richard Gibbs, Ph.D., he developed computational approaches that accelerated rare-disease discovery. Working with exome sequencing data from more than 18,000 individuals, he helped identify 154 candidate Mendelian disorders and contributed to studies that expanded scientific understanding of several genetic conditions.
As principal investigator, Dr. Hansen has led approximately $2.75 million in NIH-funded research. He was selected as the first recipient of the NIH Small Business Transition Grant for Early Career Scientists from the National Human Genome Research Institute, progressing through Phase I, NIH I-Corps and Phase II support for privacy-preserving rare-disease research infrastructure. He also served as principal investigator on a separate Phase I SBIR award from the National Library of Medicine to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies that enable secure, patient-controlled reuse of genomic data for clinical decision support.
Dr. Hansen later led a $1.65 million research and development collaboration with the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina as part of an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health-funded program. His team’s work on agentic artificial intelligence received the Best Paper Award at the 2025 Machine Learning for Health Symposium.
Dr. Hansen is a co-inventor on an issued U.S. patent for secure data exchange and additional pending patent applications. He has served as an invited reviewer for several NIH grant-review panels spanning genomics, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, health information technology and medical devices. He serves on the industry advisory board for the University of Utah Department of Biomedical Informatics and has spoken internationally on precision medicine, health equity and healthcare innovation. Fluent in Mandarin, Dr.Hansen also volunteers as an instructor for a weekly English as a Second Language course in Sugar Land, Texas.
