Richard J. Roberts

Sir Richard Roberts, an entrepreneur, molecular biologist, and architect of gene-splicing, is the Chief Scientific Officer of New England Biolabs, where he has been a Director of Research since 1992. Before moving to NEB, he was at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, where he reached the position of Assistant Director for Research under Dr. James. D. Watson. He was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.

Dr. Roberts' laboratory has a long history of research on restriction enzymes and their associated DNA methyltransferases. He is involved in developing methods to find new enzymes with novel properties and using a combination of bioinformatics and biochemical experimentation to probe DNA sequence information from the many microbial genome sequences that are now available. Dr. Roberts' research focuses on finding general ways to predict function in such cases and to use bioinformatics to make predictions that can then be tested experimentally.

Dr. Roberts has authored over 300 publications and more than 10 patents. He has served on a number of Scientific Advisory Boards, including Celera Genomics, Genex, Oxford Molecular Group and Linkeus Biotech.