George Church

George M. Church, Ph.D., is a distinguished Professor of Genetics and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Church is widely regarded as a pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology, having authored and co-authored more than 270 publications and 50 patents. His 1984 Harvard Ph.D. included the first direct genomic sequencing method. He invented the broadly applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and array DNA synthesizers. He helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP) in 2005. His many innovations in genomics, computational biology, genetics, and systems, and synthetic biology have been the basis for a number of companies. He is director of the NIH CCV Center for Excellence in Genomic Science and director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard & MIT. He is a Hoogendijk Prize awardee, a Franklin Laureate for Achievement in Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.