Niels Klitgord studied Molecular/Cell Biology, minoring in Chemistry, for his undergraduate degree at the University of New Mexico, receiving his B.Sc. in 2000 with honors. His senior research project involved characterizing the promoter region of the Mef2 gene in Drosophila. Following graduation, he worked first for the biotech company Exelixis in California, running high throughput reverse-genetic screens in Drosophila, in search for novel cancer therapeutic targets. He then joined the startup biotech company Genospectra, where he oversaw bioinformatics databases, and designed DNA probes. One year later Niels Klitgord joined the Cancer Center for Systems Biology (CCSB) under the direction of Dr. Marc Vidal at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, working as a bioinformatics technician. In the CCSB he got to participate in a plethora of projects related to protein-protein interactions, studying the interaction properties of domains, disease causing alleles, and disorder-associated regions. In 2007 he entered the Bioinformatics PhD program at Boston University, where he joined the Segre lab, to study metabolic networks in multicellular systems.