Jim Heath

Jim Heath is the President of the Institute for Systems Biology and holds faculty appointments at the University of Washington (Biomolecular Engineering) and UCLA Geffen School of Medicine (Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology). From 2003 to 2018 he served as the Elizabeth Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech. He received a B.Sc. degree in chemistry from Baylor University in 1984, and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from Rice University in 1988, where he studied in the group of Nobel Laureate Richard E. Smalley. Dr. Heath was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley from 1988 to 1991, and a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Labs in Yorktown Heights, New York from 1991 to 1994. In 1994 he left IBM to join the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. He was the founding director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), prior to moving to Caltech in 2003.

Dr. Heath is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and his awards include Jules Springer Award in Applied Physics (2000); the Feynman Prize (2000); the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (2001), and the Spiers Medal from the Royal Society (2005). Dr. Heath directs the National Cancer Institute-funded NanoSystems Biology Cancer Center and has been a founder of a number of startup companies, including MTI (acquired by Siemens in 2005), NanoSys, Inc., Integrated Diagnostics, Indi Molecular and Momentum Biosciences, which is a biotech incubator currently operating in Los Angeles. In 2009 Heath was named by Forbes as one of the top 7 innovators in the world.