Robert Steen

Robert Steen is the director of Harvard Medical School’s genomics core facility located within the Department of Genetics in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston. He directs a team of scientists that provide a wide variety of molecular biology services to the faculty at HMS and its sixteen affiliate hospitals and research institutes. Robert has expertise in technology evaluation, process optimization, production oversite, team management and data quality analysis. His core currently focuses on sample preparation and next-generation sequencing for a wide variety of scientific applications. He has over 17 years of experience directing core facilities, three years as director of the HHMI genetics core at HMS and 14 years as current director of the genomics core within the department of genetics at HMS.

In the nine years prior to serving as a core director, Robert worked on and later managed various teams under the direction of Dr. Eric Lander and Dr. Thomas Hudson at the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, constructing the first comprehensive, genome-wide genetic maps of the mouse and rat. From 1988 to 1991 Robert conducted research on the origins of HIV and SIV in the department of microbiology and molecular genetics at the New England Regional Primate Research Center at Harvard Medical School.