Rate My Professor George Church

George Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves as founding core faculty and leads synthetic biology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. Church received Bachelor of Science degrees in chemistry and zoology from Duke University and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Harvard University in 1984. He joined the Harvard Medical School faculty as an assistant professor in 1986.

Church is a pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He developed the first direct genomic sequencing method in 1984, which enabled the first complete genome sequence of the human pathogen H. pylori, and contributed to the initiation of the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. His innovations include molecular multiplexing and tags, homologous recombination methods, array DNA synthesizers, and advancements in gene editing and genome engineering. Church has co-authored more than 500 papers and the book Regenesis. He directs the U.S. Department of Energy Technology Center and the National Institutes of Health Center of Excellence in Genomic Science. His honors include the 2011 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science from the Franklin Institute and election to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.