Dr. Myers received his B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1977, his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, and his postdoctoral training at Harvard University. He began his first faculty position at the University of California at San Francisco in 1986 and moved his laboratory to Stanford University’s Department of Genetics in 1993, where he was named professor and later chair. Dr. Myers’s research program is focused on human genetics and genomics. Work in his laboratory has led to the identification of genes involved in several inherited diseases, and his genome center contributed more than 10 percent of the data in the public Human Genome Project’s efforts to sequence the human genome. His lab continues to use genomics tools and genetics to understand how genes interacting with the environment contribute to human diseases and other traits.
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Dr. Han received his M.D. from Suzhou Medical College in JiangSu Province, China in 1983 and his Ph.D. in clinical molecular genetics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 1991. He obtained his board certification in 1996 in clinical molecular genetics and served as clinical molecular laboratory director and assistant professor in the UAB Department of Pediatrics. In 1996 he founded biotech company Genaco. Genaco was the first company to introduce Down syndrome prenatal screening and diagnostic service to China. During the SARS outbreak of 2003, Genaco developed technology and products for molecular differential diagnoses of infectious diseases. Han created a novel multiplex PCR technology, tem-PCR, that allows multiple molecular targets to be amplified in one reaction. A series of products was developed and commercialized. The technology won Genaco several awards, including the 2006 Frost & Sullivan Technology Innovation and Leadership Award and the 2007 Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award. Genaco was acquired by the world’s leading molecular diagnostic company, Qiagen, in 2006.
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Dr. Absher has been involved in human genetics from a variety of perspectives. He earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology at Emory University where he worked with Stephen Warren on Fragile X syndrome, a common form of mental retardation. As a postdoctoral fellow, he continued his focus on Mendelian diseases by working on Huntington disease with Richard Myers at Stanford University. Absher then moved to the Stanford Human Genome Center where he began work on complex genetics, including genome-wide association studies of bipolar disorder and cardiovascular disease, as well as population genetics studies involving human populations from around the world. At HudsonAlpha, Absher is working on complex genetic diseases and traits. He incorporates the study of epigenetic influences on disease development by looking at genome-wide methylation patterns in disease populations. He also is continuing his work on population genetics and the emerging field of copy number variation.
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Jeremy Schmutz began programming computers when he was five years old. He graduated from North Central College in three years with a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in biology. During college, he worked on DNA sequencing technology at Argonne National Laboratory that led to his first research position developing parallel sequencing systems at a small silicon valley startup company. In 1996, Schmutz joined the newly formed sequencing group at the Stanford Human Genome Center (SHGC) to develop the computational infrastructure necessary for large scale DNA sequencing. Schmutz and his group finished and assembled the human sequence of chromosomes 5, 16 and 19. He also led the quality assessment of the human genome sequence that evaluated the accuracy and completeness of the final human genome sequence. Currently, Schmutz leads the informatics and production sequencing groups at the SHGC and continues to work on genome sequencing projects of plants and fungi. He joins HudsonAlpha in 2008.
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Dr. Grimwood received her B.Sc. and Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Oxford, Dartmouth College and the University of San Francisco. Since 2000, she has been a senior scientist at the Stanford Human Genome Center where she and her group were responsible for finishing and performing quality analysis on the 320 million base pairs of human chromosomes 5, 16 and 19, comprising more than 10 percent of the human genome. After the completion of the Human Genome Project, Grimwood continues to lead a group focusing on sequencing, finishing and genome improvement of a wide variety of eukaryotic genomes, including plants, fungi and vertebrates. She joins HudsonAlpha in 2008.
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Dr. Barsh is professor of genetics and pediatrics and associate chair of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a visiting investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute. Barsh received M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Washington; obtained postgraduate training at UC Los Angeles and UC San Francisco, and has been a member of the Stanford faculty for 18 years. His research program is focused on the genetic architecture of color variation in laboratory mice and in natural populations of mammals, including humans. His research accomplishments based on the application of mouse coat color genetics to basic problems in cell signaling, gene regulation, and human disease have been recognized by several awards, including the E Mead Johnson Award from the Society of Pediatric Research, and the Takeuchi and Seiji Awards from the International Society for Pigment Cell Research. He is also a former investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, director of the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program, and deputy editor of PLoS Genetics.
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