Founding Director, The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Professor of Biology, MIT & Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
Eric S. Lander is one of the driving forces behind the current revolution in genomics, the systematic study of an organism’s complete set of genetic information. Under his leadership, the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge was responsible for developing many of the key tools of modern mammalian genomics and was a leading contributor to the Human Genome Project - the concerted effort to map the complete genetic information for human beings. More recently, his research group has studied the genetic basis of cancer.
A graduate of Princeton University in New Jersey and Oxford University in England (and of Stuyvesant High School in New York City), Lander is a mathematician by training. Finding himself drawn into the burgeoning field of genomics, Lander joined both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Whitehead Institute, founding those institutions' joint Center for Genome Research in 1990 and serving as the founding director of the newly created Broad Institute, a collaboration of MIT, Harvard University and affiliated hospitals, and the Whitehead Institute, in 2003. He is also a professor of biology at MIT and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
