Hamilton O. Smith

Dr. Smith received his A.B. in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1952 and his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1956. He served as a LTMC in the U.S. Navy from 1957-1959 and completed a medical residency at Ford hospital in Detroit from 1959-1962. He joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University in 1967 as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology, where he studied restriction and modification enzymes, genetic recombination, and bacterial transformation. In 1978, Dr. Smith received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on restriction endonucleases and their application to molecular genetics. In 1995, Dr. Smith and a team from The Institute for Genomics Research sequenced the first organism, Haemophilus influenzae, which was the same organism from which he purified the first restriction enzyme. From 1998 to 2002, he was Director of DNA Resources at Celera Genomics and participated in the sequencing of the human genome. Since 2002, he has led the synthetic biology and biological energy groups at the Venter Institute.