Genomic and genetic analysis of human traits and disease 

Richard Myers, PhD, is passionate about changing the world through genomics—a vision profoundly shaped by his leadership role in the Human Genome Project. Myers led a team at the Stanford Human Genome Center that contributed more than 10 percent of the data in the public Human Genome Project’s efforts to sequence the human genome.

“While I think we knew working on the Human Genome Project that it would be the basis for all this research,” Myers says, “I really don’t think I would have predicted at the time that we could turn it into something so quickly where we could look at a genetic blueprint and apply it to medical solutions or agricultural and environmental solutions. We’re just at the beginning.”

During his tenure as the president, science director, and faculty investigator at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Myers has contributed to many discoveries in the genomic sciences that are improving the human condition around the globe. Myers’ lab at HudsonAlpha studies the human genome to understand how changes in the genome contribute to human traits, including human diseases and behaviors.

“Genes are like instructions and instructions, just like words on a page, can have a typographical error, a mistake,” Myers says.  “If you have a mistake, it can cause a mild problem, or it can cause something severe, even deadly. We are interested not only in genetic variation that we are born with but also how variation in the expression of the genome in people contributes to health and disease.”

The Myers Lab also applies genomic approaches to identify sections of the genome related to clinical and basic biological problems. They examine how genes interacting with the environment contribute to human diseases and other traits, and they work to understand how the human genome is involved in neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depressive disorder. These studies focus on understanding the causes of these diseases and developing therapeutic approaches to mitigate them, as well as on identifying blood-based biomarker tests for early detection and monitoring the progression of these disorders.

Myers, a native of Selma and Tuscaloosa, Ala., received his BS in biochemistry from the University of Alabama in 1976 and his PhD in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1982. After completing his postdoctoral training at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Center in 1985. He moved to Stanford University in 1993, where he served as professor and chair in the department of genetics until he moved to HudsonAlpha in 2008.