Scientific Advisory Board

show all hide all

George Church PhD

Dr. Church is currently Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences & Technology at MIT. With Walter Gilbert, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984 and helped initiate the Human Genome Project while he was a Research Scientist at newly-formed Biogen Inc. He invented the broadly-applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, and DNA array synthesizers. Technology transfer of automated sequencing and software to Genome Therapeutics Corporation resulted in the first commercial genome sequence (the human pathogen, H. pylori) in 1994.

Dr. Church initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP) in January 2004, and research on synthetic biology. He is director of the US Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard and MIT and director of the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard, MIT and Washington University. He has been advisor to 22 companies, most recently co-founding Codon Devices, Inc., a biotech startup aiming to commercialize synthetic biology and LS9, a biofuels company. He is a senior editor for Nature EMBO Molecular Systems Biology.

Leroy Hood MD, PhD

Dr. Hood is currently President of the Institute for Systems Biology. His research has focused on the study of molecular immunology, biotechnology, and genomics. His professional career began at the California Institute of Technology where he and his colleagues pioneered four instruments — the DNA synthesizer and sequencer, and the protein synthesizer and sequencer — which comprise the technological foundation for contemporary molecular biology. In particular, the DNA sequencer has revolutionized genomics by allowing the rapid automated sequencing of DNA, which played a crucial role in contributing to the successful mapping of the human genome during the 1990s.

In 1992, Dr. Hood moved to the University of Washington as founder and Chairman of the cross-disciplinary Department of Molecular Biotechnology. In 2000, he co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington to pioneer systems approaches to biology and medicine. Dr. Hood is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine. He has also played a role in founding numerous biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin and Rosetta.

Dr. Hood received an MD from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a PhD in Biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He has published more than 600 peer-reviewed papers, has 14 issued patents, and has co-authored textbooks in biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, and genetics.

David Liu PhD

Dr. Liu is Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He met Professor E. J. Corey during his freshman year at Harvard College and performed research on sterol biosynthesis under Professor Corey's guidance throughout his undergraduate years. Dr. Liu graduated first in his class at Harvard in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry before entering the PhD program at U. C. Berkeley.

In the group of Professor Peter Schultz, Dr. Liu studied tRNAs and the enzymes that aminoacylate them, and initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. Dr. Liu earned his PhD in chemistry in 1999 and became Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in the same year.

He has since received numerous distinctions including the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award, the Glaxo-Smith-Kline Chemistry Scholar Award, the AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals Excellence in Chemistry Award, the Searle Scholars Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the university-wide Roslyn Abramson Award for undergraduate teaching at Harvard. He was recently named to the Popular Science "Brilliant 10" for young scientists in the US, as well as to the MIT TR100 for young innovators.

Eugene W. Myers PhD

Dr. Myers is a Group Leader at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was one of the first computer scientists to enter the field of computational molecular biology in the early 1980's, and was a key developer of BLAST and other similarity search tools in the 1990's. In 1995 he and Jim Weber proposed the whole genome shotgun sequencing of the human genome, and in 1998 he joined the founding Celera team to accomplish that mission. At Celera his team produced reconstructions of the Drosophila, Human, Mouse, and Anopheles genomes.

Dr. Myers received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1981 at the Univeristy of Colorado. He has since authored more than ninety peer-reviewed articles and holds four patents. Dr. Myers was awarded the Newcomb Cleveland Award for best article in Science in 2001 and the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in 2002. In 2003, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. In 2004 he won the International Max Planck Prize and in 2006 he was elected to the German National Academy of Science, Leopoldina.

Dr. Myers' research interests have centered on the design and analysis of algorithms in discrete pattern matching, computer graphics, and computational molecular biology. His current interest is developing algorithms and software for the automatic interpretation of images produced by light and electron microscopy of stained samples, with a particular emphasis on building 3D and 4D "atlases" of brains, developing organisms, and cellular processes.

Floyd Romesberg PhD

Dr. Romesberg is currently Associate Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Romesberg's lab at Scripps uses a broad range of interdisciplinary techniques to study different aspects of evolution, including femtosecond spectroscopy, organic chemistry, microbiology and genetics. Major focuses in the lab include the study of how evolution tailors protein dynamics and understanding how cellular stress and DNA damage induce cell cycle checkpoint responses and mutation. Another major focus of the lab is to expand the genetic alphabet by developing stable and replicable unnatural base pairs. Included in this effort is the use of phage display to evolve DNA polymerases with novel activities. Dr. Romesberg is the recipient of multiple academic awards, including the NSF CAREER Award (2004), the Susan B. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation Award (2003), the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2003), the Baxter Foundation Fellow Award (2002), and the Mac Nevin Award (1987). Dr. Romesberg received a BS from Ohio State University and a PhD from Cornell University

John Quackenbush PhD

Dr. Quackenbush completed a PhD in theoretical physics in 1990, followed by a two-year postdoctoral position in experimental particle physics and phenomenology. In 1992, he received a five year fellowship from the National Center for Human Genome Research, and turned his talents to the study of genomics. Since that time he has worked on various aspects of genomics, including mapping, sequencing, functional genomics and bioinformatics.

Since making the transition to biology, Dr. Quackenbush has worked at The Salk Institute, Stanford University, and The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). In March 2005, he joined the faculty at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute with appointments as Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology and as Professor of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is on the editorial boards of five major journals and serves as Editor-in-Chief at Genomics. In addition, he recently completed a four-year appointment as a standing member of the NIH GCAT Study Section, and is a member to two National Research Council panels examining the applications of genomic approaches to the study of toxicology.

Dr. Quackenbush's work focuses on functional and comparative genomics and bioinformatics and its application to the study of human disease. Current research projects include the identification of expression fingerprints and genomic alterations that are relevant to colon and breast tumor metastasis, the development of novel computational approaches for the interpretation of large-scale datasets, and methods for data integration to facilitate gene discovery. His group produces a series of web-based gene annotation databases that have more than 7,000,000 yearly hits and his TM4 microarray software suite has more than 100,000 estimated users.

Steve Quake PhD

Dr. Quake studied physics (BS, 1991) and mathematics (MS, 1991) at Stanford University before earning his doctorate in physics from Oxford University (1994) as a Marshall scholar. He then spent two years as a post-doc in Nobel Laureate Steven Chu's group at Stanford University developing techniques to manipulate single DNA molecules with optical tweezers.

In 1996, Dr. Quake joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology, where he rose through the ranks and was ultimately appointed the Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics. He moved back to Stanford University in 2004 to help launch a new department in Bioengineering. Dr. Quake's interests lie at the nexus of physics, biology and biotechnology. Throughout his career, he has been active in the field of single molecule biophysics; he has focused on precision measurements on single molecules, and in 2003 his group demonstrated the first proof-of-principle that sequence information could be obtained from single molecules of DNA.

Dr. Quake received "Career" and "First" awards from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health in 1997, was named a Packard Fellow in 1999, was in the inaugural class of NIH Director's Pioneer Awards in 2004, and in 2005 was selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His contributions to the development of new biotechnology at the interface between physics and biology have been recognized by recent awards from the MIT Technology Review Magazine, Forbes and Popular Science. He is a founder and scientific advisory board chair of Helicos.

Victor Velculescu MD, PhD

Dr. Velculescu is internationally known for his genomic discoveries in human cancer. He developed SAGE (serial analysis of gene expression), a method for global gene expression profiling. This approach led him to coin the word "transcriptome" to describe comprehensive gene expression patterns that could now be analyzed in human cancer and other cells.

Over the past decade, he has devised powerful technologies for analysis of the cancer genome. His group was the first to systematically analyze entire gene families for genetic mutations in human cancer. This work identified genetic alterations in phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase PIK3CA in a high fraction of colon, breast and other tumors, making this gene one of the most highly mutated oncogenes in human cancer. Dr. Velculescu has recently expanded these efforts to provide the first genome-wide analysis of genetic alterations in breast and colorectal cancers, identifying mutations in a large number of genes not previously linked to neoplasia. These findings provide novel targets for therapeutic intervention and open the door to individualized analysis and treatment of cancer.

Dr. Velculescu attended Stanford University where he graduated with Honors and Distinction in Biological Sciences. He obtained his MD and PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is currently Director of Cancer Genetics at The Ludwig Center and Associate Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins University Kimmel Cancer Center.

Dr. Velculescu has received a variety of honors for his work in cancer genomics. These include the Grand Prize Winner of the Amersham Pharmacia Biotech & Science Young Scientist Prize, The Pew Scholar Award, The Sir William Osler Young Investigator Award, and recognition as one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10" Young Scientists in 2004. He has given numerous invited lectures and has organized international conferences on topics related to his work.