02/16/2001 10"250
Eric S. Lander, Professor of Biology
; Founding Director, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
; Member, Whitehead Institute

Description: Dr. Lander is a geneticist, molecular biologist and a mathematician, with research interests in human genetics, mouse genetics, population genetics and computational and mathematical methods in biology. He and his research group have developed many of the tools of modern genome research including genomic maps of the human, mouse and rat genomes in connection with the Human Genome Project and techniques for genetic analyses of complex, multigenic traits. He has applied these techniques to the understanding of cancer, diabetes, hypertension, renal failure and dwarfism.

About the Speaker(s): Eric Lander was a world leader of the international Human Genome Project, the effort to map the blueprint for a human being. Today, Lander is using the knowledge of the human genome to tackle the fundamental issue of medicine: to find the causes of disease. Lander received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Oxford in 1981, as a Rhodes Scholar. He joined Whitehead Institute in 1986 and founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in 1990. Lander became the founding director of the newly created Broad Institute in 2003. Lander is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and U.S. Institute of Medicine. He was a MacArthur Fellow (1987"1992), and earned the Woodrow Wilson Prize from Princeton University(1998); the Baker Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching at MIT (1992); the City of Medicine Prize (2001); and the Gairdner International Prize (2002).

Host(s): School of Science, Department of Biology