1. Eric Steven Lander was born on February 3,1957 and is an American mathematician and geneticist who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.
35 Facts About Eric Lander
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Eric Lander is founding director emeritus of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
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Eric Lander was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School, graduating in 1974 as valedictorian and an International Mathematical Olympiad Silver Medalist for the US At age 17, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers, for which he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.
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Eric Lander completed his senior thesis, "On the structure of projective modules", under John Coleman Moore's supervision.
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Eric Lander then moved to the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar and student of Wolfson College, Oxford.
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Eric Lander was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the University of Oxford in 1980 with a thesis on algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs supervised by Peter Cameron.
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Eric Lander enjoyed mathematics but did not wish to spend his life in such a "monastic" career.
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At the suggestion of his brother, developmental biologist Arthur Eric Lander, he started to look at neurobiology, saying at the time, "because there's a lot of information in the brain".
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Eric Lander later became acquainted with David Botstein, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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In 1986 Eric Lander joined the Whitehead Institute and became an assistant professor at MIT.
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The WICGR became one of the world's leading centers of genome research, and under Eric Lander's leadership made great progress in developing new methods of analyzing mammalian genomes.
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Eric Lander aggressively pressured Human Genome Project scientists to work longer and faster to publish genome fragments before Celera.
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Eric Lander himself is listed on 73 patents and patent applications related to genomics.
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Eric Lander was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.
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Eric Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute, a collaboration between MIT, Harvard, the Whitehead Institute, and affiliated hospitals.
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Eric Lander is often credited as among the drivers for the Broad Institute's meteoric rise during the 16 years he was a director.
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Eric Lander toasted to James Watson in 2018 for his 90th birthday, which caused controversy in the wake of Watson's widely criticized comments around intelligence and race.
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Eric Lander had included a brief aside in his toast stating that Watson was flawed, but still later apologized for his toast after significant outrage from academics on Twitter.
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Eric Lander received criticism in the past for allegedly diminishing the accomplishments of Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier after publishing "The Heroes of CRISPR" in Cell.
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Eric Lander responded by suggesting he had not meant "to diminish anybody" and noted that science is collaborative by nature.
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In 1989, Lander provided expert testimony in the New York criminal case People v Castro.
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Eric Lander showed that the then-current method of interpreting DNA evidence was liable to give false positive matches, implicating innocent defendants.
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Eric Lander is a member of the Innocence Project's board of directors.
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In 2009, Eric Lander was appointed by President Obama as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, serving for the entire term.
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Eric Lander was sworn in as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy on June 2,2021.
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Eric Lander took his oath using a rare 1492 copy of the Pirkei Avot.
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Since 2023, Eric Lander has returned to his tenured professor positions at MIT and Harvard as well as the Broad Institute as a Core Institute Member and Founding Director Emeritus.
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In 2023, Lander started a non-profit called Science for America focused on "moonshot" ideas such as nuclear fusion or cancer research.
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In 1999, Lander received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
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In 2004, Eric Lander was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of our time for his work on the Human Genome Project.
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Eric Lander has appeared in numerous PBS documentaries about genetics.
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Eric Lander is a member of the advisory board to the USA Science and Engineering Festival.
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In 2013, Eric Lander was awarded the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
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In 2017, Eric Lander received an honoris causa doctorate from the Universite catholique de Louvain.
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In 2021, Eric Lander, who holds many patents, disclosed ownership of assets worth more than $45 million.