Dr. George M. Church is a world-renowned geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, and the Co-Director of SeedLabs. He is currently the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at both Harvard and MIT. George was a founding member of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and serves as Director of the U.S. Department of Energy Technology Center, the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science, and an IARPA BRAIN Project.

Dr. Church pioneered the specialized fields of personal genomics, synthetic biology, and genome engineering; his groundbreaking 1984 dissertation at Harvard introduced the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing, and barcoding. These innovations led to the first ever full genome sequence in 1994, a landmark contribution that launched a new generation of DNA sequencing methods. He has co-founded several application-based companies spanning the field of genetic sequencing, medical diagnostics, and synthetic biology and therapeutics, with groundbreaking research in chip-DNA-synthesis, gene editing, and stem cell engineering.

In 2015, Dr. Church and his team successfully copied woolly mammoth genes using the CRISPR DNA editing technique, splicing genetic segments from a frozen mammoth into the DNA of a modern elephant, marking the first time a mammoth’s genes were functionally active since the species became extinct. Dr. Church has received numerous awards including the 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science from the Franklin Institute and election to the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering. He has co-authored 453 papers, 105 patent publications & one book. In 2017, he was listed as one of the 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine.

Key Publications:

Scheiman J, Luber JM, Tung A, Chavkin TA, MacDonald T, Punthambaker S, Tierney BT, Pham LD, Yang Z, Wibowo MC, Hattab M, Lessard S, Church GM, Kostic AD (2018) The Gut Microbiome Influences Physical Performance via Lactate Metabolism. Submitted

Biteen JS, Blainey PC, Cardon ZG, Chun M, Church G, Dorrestein PC, Fraser SE, Gilbert J, Jansson JK, Knight R, Miller JF, Ozcan A, Prather KA, Taha S, van den Engh G, Quake S, Ruby EG, Silver P, Weiss PS, Wong GCL, Wright AT, Xie XS, Young TD (2015) Tools for the Microbiome: Nano and Beyond. ACS Nano. PMID: 26695070

Debelius JW, McDonald D, The American Gut Consortium, Knight R (2015) American Gut: an Open Platform for Citizen-Science Microbiome Research. In prep.

Yaung SJ, Church GM, Wang HH (2013) Recent Progress in Engineering Human-associated Microbiomes. Methods Mol Biol. 2014;1151:3-25. PMID: 24838875

Sommer MO, Church GM, Dantas G (2010) The human microbiome harbors a diverse reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes. Virulence. 1(4):299-303. PMID: 21178459

Dreyfuss JM, Levner D, Galagan JE, Church GM, Ramoni MF (2012) How accurate can genetic predictions be? BMC Genomics 13(1):340. PMID: 22827772

Khoury MJ, McBride C, Schully SD, Ioannidis JPA, Feero WG, Janssens ACJW, Gwinn M, Simons-Morton DG, Bernhardt JM, Cargill M, Chanock SJ, Church GM, Coates RJ, Collins FS, Croyle RT, Davis BR, Downing GJ, DuRoss A, Friedman S, Gail MH, Ginsburg GS, Green RC, Greene MH, Greenland P, Gulcher JR, Hsu A, Hudson KL, Kardia SLR, Kimmel PL, Lauer MS, Miller AM, Offit K, Ransohoff DF, Roberts S, Rasooly RS, Stefansson K, Terry SF, Teutsch SM, Trepanier A, Wanke KL, Witte JS, Xu J (2009) The Scientific Foundation for Personal Genomics. Genetics in Medicine Jul 16; PMID: 19617843

Church GM (2007) Personal Genomics Will Arrive This Year, and With It a Revolutionary Wave of Volunteerism and Self-Knowledge Edge World Question (Jan 2007) .

Grad YH, Roth FP, Halfon MS, Church GM (2004) Prediction of similarly-acting cis-regulatory modules by subsequence profiling and comparative genomics in D. melanogaster and D. pseudoobscura. Bioinformatics, May 14.

Hudson TJ, Engelstein M, Lee MK, Ho EC, Rubenfield MJ, Adams CP, Housman DE, Dracopoli NC (1992) Isolation and chromosomal assignment of 100 highly informative human simple sequence repeat polymorphisms. Genomics. 13(3):622-9.