About GnuBIO

Founding Members Advisors NIH Careers

David A Weitz, PhD

Co-Founder and Board Member

 

David A. Weitz is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University, where he has appointment in both the Physics Department and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard, and then worked at Exxon Research and Engineering for nearly 18 years. He then was a professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania before returning to Harvard, where he leads the experimental soft condensed matter physics research group. His research efforts include soft matter physics, biophysics and biotechnology. He is Director of Harvard’s NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and co-Director of the BASF Advanced Research Initiative and the Kavli Institute of Bionano Science and Technology. He is a member of the National Academies of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Science.

Dietrich Stephan, PhD

Dr. Stephan is a human geneticist who works to understand the root causes of common human diseases so that early diagnostics and interventions can be implemented. Dr. Stephan most recently was the deputy director of discovery research at the Translational Genomics Research Institute and still holds a faculty appointment there. Dr. Stephan has identified genes that predispose to disorders such as autism, exercise-induced heart attacks and sudden infant death syndrome, and contributed to understanding a multitude of common “complex genetic” disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Stephan is chairman of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Neuroscience Microarray Consortium, and has previously held faculty appointments at Johns Hopkins University, the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, George Washington University and the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Dr. Stephan has published extensively in journals such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Genetics and the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Stephan received his B.S. at Carnegie-Mellon University and his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, and trained as a fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH.

George Church, PhD

George Church is Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics, and brings over 25 years experience in the invention and commercialization of sequencing technology. In 1984, with Walter Gilbert, he developed the first direct genomic sequencing method and helped initiate the Human Genome Project while a Research Scientist at newly-formed Biogen Inc., and in 2005, Dr. Church initiated the Personal Genome Project to catalyze the expansion of genomics into human healthcare. He has served in advisory roles for 12 journals (including Nature Molecular Systems Biology), 5 granting agencies and 24-plus biotech companies (e.g. 23andme & recently founding Pathogenica, Knome and LS9). He earned B.A. degrees in Zoology and Chemistry from Duke University and a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University. His current research focuses on integrating biosystems-modeling with personal genomics & synthetic biology.

Justin Lamb, PhD

Justin Lamb PhD is a Senior Scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, and leader of the Institutes Connectivity Map project. He received a BSc in Pharmacy from Heriot-Watt University and a PhD in Medicine from the University of Aberdeen. Before joining The Broad in 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School.

Michael Phillips, PhD

Dr. Michael S. Phillips, Ph.D., was previously Scientific Director at The Beaulieu-Saucier Université de Montréal Pharmacogenomics Centre in Canada. He is also the recipient of a federal Canada Research Chair in Translational Pharmacogenomics and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Montréal. He is principal investigator, with Dr. Jean-Claude Tardif, of the Genome Canada/Genome Quebec project, Pharmacogenomics of Drug Efficacy and Toxicity in the Treatment of Cardiovascular Disease.

Dr. Phillips obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He then worked with Merck Research Laboratories on human pharmacogenetics, and subsequently was Associate Director in the Department of Pharmacogenetics at Orchid BioSciences, Inc.