George Church

George Church is a leading expert in human genetics and biotechnology.He has served as professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School since 1986 and currently serves as professor of health sciences and technology at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).He is also director of the U.S. 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. Church helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. Church pioneered genome engineering, systems and synthetic biology, and concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags, and he has a successful track record of developing and transferring new technologies to more than 20 companies. Church has received numerous awards, including the 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science from the Franklin Institute, the 2009 Promega Biotechnology Research Award from the American Society for Microbiology, and was honored in The Scientist’s Top 10 Innovations list in 2008. Church holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University and a B.A. in zoology and chemistry from Duke University.