Scientific Advisory Board

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Steven Chu PhD

Dr. Chu is currently the Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Professor of Physics, and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California, Berkeley. He previously was a Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University. Prior to his work at Stanford, Dr. Chu spent many years at the Bell Laboratories as the Head of the Quantum Electronics Department. His scientific interests include: parity non-conservation in atoms, energy transfer in solids and Anderson localization, positronium and muonium spectroscopy, laser cooling and trapping of atoms, atom interferometry, polymer physics and biophysics. His development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light led to the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics.

At Stanford, he helped start Bio-X, a multi-disciplinary initiative linking the physical and biological sciences with engineering and medicine. He has become active in the energy problem and is co-chairing an international InterAcademy Council study "Transitioning to Sustainable Energy". He has held numerous visiting lectureships that include Harvard University, JILA, Collège de France, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia Sinica, and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Korean Academy of Science and Engineering.

Dr. Chu serves on the Boards of the Hewlett Foundation, the University of Rochester, NVIDIA, and the scientific boards of the Moore Foundation, and NABsys. He has served on a number of national committees that included the Augustine Committee that produced the report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," Advisory Committee to the Director of the NIH and the National Nuclear Security Agency, and was on the Executive Committee of the NAS Board on Physics and Astronomy. Professor Chu received AB and BS degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Rochester, a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley, as well as eight honorary degrees.

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.

Donald Crothers PhD

Dr. Crothers is a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University. He joined the Yale chemistry faculty in 1964, after completing his doctoral research at the University of California San Diego in 1963 and postdoctoral research at the Max-Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany. At Yale he led the Department of Chemistry through periods of growth as its chair 1975-1981 and 1994-1999. His research interests encompass the physical chemistry of biological polymers, particularly that of nucleic acids. He also served on the editorial board of numerous journals including Biochemistry, Journal of Molecular Biology, Biopolymers, Nucleic Acid Research and the Quarterly Review of Biophysics. Crothers received a BS from Yale University, a BA from Cambridge University, and a PhD from the University of California, San Diego.

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.

Milan Mrksich PhD

Dr. Mrksich joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 1996. He is a founding member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics and serves as the Associate Director of the NanoScience and Engineering Center, centered at Northwestern University. He was recently appointed to be an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Mrksich directs a laboratory of 20 predoctoral students and postdoctoral fellows; his group leads in the emerging area of engineering interfaces between materials and biological environments. He has developed a broad range of methods for modifying materials with biologicals and has applied these innovations to scaffolds for tissue engineering, biochip microarrays and fundamental studies of cell migration.

Dr. Mrksich serves on the Board of Governors of Argonne National Laboratory, as Vice Chair of the DARPA Defense Sciences Research Council, and as a member of the editorial boards of Langmuir, IEEE Transactions on NanoBioscience, Chemistry & Biology and Chemical Society Reviews. He also serves on the scientific advisory boards of ChemoCentryx and Surface Logix, and on the advisory board of the Searle Scholars Program and the National Institutes of Health EBT Study Section. He has served on World Technology Evaluation Center panels for International Evaluation of Tissue Engineering Programs and for International Evaluation of Biosensor Programs, the International Panel for Review of Materials Research in the United Kingdom, and the Board of Directors of the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative.

Dr. Mrksich received a BS from the University of Illinois and a PhD from the California Institute of Technology. He has over 100 published papers and 10 patents.

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.

Jeffrey M. Trent PhD

Dr. Jeffrey M. Trent is currently the President and Scientific Director of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a Phoenix, Arizona, based non-profit biomedical research institute. Prior to TGen, Dr. Trent served for ten years at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. There, he served as the Founding Scientific Director for the National Human Genome Research Institute, the federal agency in charge of coordinating and finalizing the Human Genome Project. Dr. Trent's current and past research has provided important insights into the genetic basis of cancer and has led to improved diagnoses and treatment for those battling breast cancer, melanoma, and other debilitating diseases. Prior to NIH, Dr. Trent held an endowed Professorship at the University of Michigan (UM) and directed a division of UM's Comprehensive Cancer Center. He held similar positions at the Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of over 300 manuscripts in scientific literature, has received numerous honors and awards, and sits on the editorial boards of more than a dozen scientific publications.

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.