George Church

(1954- ) is an American molecular geneticist. He is perhaps one of the most influential scientist in genomics if not the most.

He is currently Professor of Genetics ^{at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences & Technology [2} at Harvard and MIT. With Walter Gilbert he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984^{and helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 [4} 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 [6}, and DNA array synthesizers. Technology transfer of automated sequencing & software to Genome Therapeutics Corp. resulted in the first commercial genome sequence, (the human pathogen, Helicobacter pylori) in 1994 ^{He initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP) [8} in 2005 and research on synthetic biology. He is director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard & MIT ^{and director of the National Institutes of Health (NHGRI) Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard, MIT & Washington University [10}. He has been advisor to 22 companies, most recently co-founding (with Joseph Jacobson, Jay Keasling, and Drew Endy) Codon Devices, a biotech startup dedicated to synthetic biology^{and (with Chris Somerville) founding LS9, which is focused on biofuels [12}. He is a senior editor for Nature EMBO Molecular Systems Biology. 

See also

External links

• George Church in Wikipedia.org
• Church Lab webpage
• New Polony DNA Sequencing Methods
• Biosketch on Edge.org

References