37 Facts About Eric Lander

1.

Eric Steven Lander was born on February 3,1957 and is an American mathematician and geneticist who served as the 11th director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President, serving on the presidential Cabinet.

2.

Eric Lander is a core institute member and founding director emeritus of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

3.

Eric Lander served as president and founding director from Broad's inception until 2021.

4.

Eric Lander is a 1987 MacArthur Fellow and Rhodes Scholar.

5.

Eric Lander co-chaired President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

6.

Eric Lander announced he would resign from the Biden Administration effective February 18,2022, after allegations surfaced he had engaged in bullying and abusive conduct directed against his subordinates and other White House staff.

7.

Since 2023, Eric Lander has returned to his tenured professor positions at MIT and Harvard as well as Broad as a Core Institute Member and Founding Director Emeritus.

8.

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 Eric Lander attended and later taught at the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics program.

9.

Eric Lander graduated from Princeton University in 1978 as valedictorian and with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.

10.

Eric Lander completed his senior thesis, "On the structure of projective modules", under John Coleman Moore's supervision.

11.

Eric Lander then moved to the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar and student of Wolfson College, Oxford.

12.

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.

13.

Eric Lander enjoyed mathematics but did not wish to spend his life in such a "monastic" career.

14.

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".

15.

Eric Lander later became acquainted with David Botstein, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

16.

In 1986 Eric Lander joined the Whitehead Institute and became an assistant professor at MIT.

17.

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.

18.

Eric Lander aggressively pressured Human Genome Project scientists to work longer and faster to publish genome fragments before Celera.

19.

Eric Lander himself is listed on 73 patents and patent applications related to genomics.

20.

Eric Lander was the founding editor of the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics.

21.

Eric Lander is the founder and director of the Broad Institute, a collaboration between MIT, Harvard, the Whitehead Institute, and affiliated hospitals.

22.

Eric Lander's group has recently discovered an important association that accounts for a large proportion of the population's risk for adult-onset diabetes.

23.

For several years, Eric Lander has co-taught MIT's required undergraduate introductory biology course with Robert Weinberg.

24.

Eric Lander is a founding advisor of Foundation Medicine, a company that aims to bring comprehensive cancer genomic analysis to routine clinical care.

25.

Eric Lander is a co-founder of Verastem, a biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering and developing drugs to treat cancer by targeting cancer stem cells.

26.

In 1989, Lander provided expert testimony in the New York criminal case People v Castro.

27.

Eric Lander showed that the then-current method of interpreting DNA evidence was liable to give false positive matches, implicating innocent defendants.

28.

Eric Lander is a member of the Innocence Project's board of directors.

29.

Eric Lander was sworn in as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy on June 2,2021.

30.

Eric Lander took his oath using a rare 1492 copy of the Pirkei Avot.

31.

In 1999, Lander received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

32.

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.

33.

Eric Lander has appeared in numerous PBS documentaries about genetics.

34.

Eric Lander is a member of the advisory board to the USA Science and Engineering Festival.

35.

In 2013, Eric Lander was awarded the first Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

36.

In 2017, Eric Lander received an honoris causa doctorate from the Universite catholique de Louvain.

37.

In 2021, Eric Lander, who holds many patents, disclosed ownership of assets worth more than $45 million.