<br />

He is currently Professor of Genetics <sup class="reference" id="_ref-0">[1]</sup> at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences &amp; Technology <sup class="reference" id="_ref-HST_0">[2]</sup> at Harvard and MIT. With Walter Gilbert he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984<sup class="reference" id="_ref-1">[3]</sup> and helped initiate the Human Genome Project in 1984 <sup class="reference" id="_ref-2">[4]</sup> while he was a Research Scientist at newly-formed Biogen Inc. He invented the broadly-applied concepts of molecular multiplexing and tags<sup class="reference" id="_ref-3">[5]</sup>, homologous recombination methods <sup class="reference" id="_ref-4">[6]</sup>, and DNA array synthesizers. Technology transfer of automated sequencing &amp; software to Genome Therapeutics Corp. resulted in the first commercial genome sequence, (the human pathogen, <em>Helicobacter pylori</em>) in 1994 <sup class="reference" id="_ref-NG_0">[7]</sup>. He initiated the Personal Genome Project (PGP) <sup class="reference" id="_ref-5">[8]</sup> in 2005 and research on synthetic biology. He is director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard &amp; MIT <sup class="reference" id="_ref-6">[9]</sup> and director of the National Institutes of Health (NHGRI) Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard, MIT &amp; Washington University <sup class="reference" id="_ref-7">[10]</sup>. 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<sup class="reference" id="_ref-8">[11]</sup> and (with Chris Somerville) founding LS9, which is focused on biofuels <sup class="reference" id="_ref-9">[12]</sup>. He is a senior editor for Nature EMBO Molecular Systems Biology.&nbsp;<br />