Andy is the director of Computational Biology for the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Intramural Research Program. He is also a senior scientist leading the Computational Genomics Unit at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

His research program uses computational approaches to understand the molecular innovations that drove the surge of diversity in early animal evolution. His research group focuses on the analysis of genomes of early branching animal phyla to understand the relationship between genomic and morphological complexity, as well as the evolution of novel cell types.

Baxevanis received his Bachelor of Science in biological sciences from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in the Department of Biology at The Johns Hopkins University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH, after which he joined the NHGRI faculty. His involvement in educational activities have included teaching bioinformatics at The Johns Hopkins University, serving as an adjunct faculty member at Boston University, and serving as the director of NHGRI's Intramural Training Office. He has also served as the co-director of the Boston University/NIH Graduate Partnerships Program in Bioinformatics.