Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.
Leroy "Lee" Edward Hood is an American biologist who has served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Washington. Hood has developed ground-breaking scientific instruments which made possible major advances in the biological sciences and the medical sciences. These include the first gas phase protein sequencer (1982), for determining the sequence of amino acids in a given protein; a DNA synthesizer (1983), to synthesize short sections of DNA; a peptide synthesizer (1984), to combine amino acids into longer peptides and short proteins; the first automated DNA sequencer (1986), to identify the order of nucleotides in DNA; ink-jet oligonucleotide technology for synthesizing DNA and nanostring technology for analyzing single molecules of DNA and RNA.
Lap-Chee Tsui is a Chinese-born Canadian geneticist and served as the 14th Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Hong Kong.
Eric Steven Lander is an American mathematician and geneticist who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Eric Lander is founding director emeritus of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
Howard Robert Horvitz ForMemRS NAS AAA&S APS NAM is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston, whose "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death" were "important for medical research and have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases".
Oliver Smithies was a British-American geneticist and physical biochemist. He is known for introducing starch as a medium for gel electrophoresis in 1955, and for the discovery, simultaneously with Mario Capecchi and Martin Evans, of the technique of homologous recombination of transgenic DNA with genomic DNA, a much more reliable method of altering animal genomes than previously used, and the technique behind gene targeting and knockout mice. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for his genetics work.
David Botstein is an American biologist who is the chief scientific officer of Calico. He was the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003 to 2013, where he remains an Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics.
Mary-Claire King is an American geneticist. She was the first to show that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the gene she called BRCA1. She studies human genetics and is particularly interested in genetic heterogeneity and complex traits. She studies the interaction of genetics and environmental influences and their effects on human conditions such as breast and ovarian cancer, inherited deafness, schizophrenia, HIV, systemic lupus erythematosus and rheumatoid arthritis. She has been the American Cancer Society Professor of the Department of Genome Sciences and of Medical Genetics in the Department of Medicine at the University of Washington since 1995.
The Gruber Prize in Genetics, established in 2001, is one of three international awards worth US$500,000 made by the Gruber Foundation, a non-profit organization based at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Francis Sellers Collins is an American physician-scientist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents.
Robert Hugh "Bob" Waterston, is an American biologist. He is best known for his work on the Human Genome Project, for which he was a pioneer along with John Sulston.
Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist who has done pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, and made other fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics. Doudna was one of the first women to share a Nobel in the sciences. She received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, with Emmanuelle Charpentier, "for the development of a method for genome editing." She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the department of chemistry and the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997.
Lynne Elizabeth Maquat is an American biochemist and molecular biologist whose research focuses on the cellular mechanisms of human disease. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. She currently holds the J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair and is a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, pediatrics and of oncology at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Professor Maquat is also Founding Director of the Center for RNA Biology and Founding Chair of Graduate Women in Science at the University of Rochester.
Ronald G. Worton is a Canadian doctor.
Jeffrey Victor Ravetch is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at The Rockefeller University.
Dr. John Engelhardt is the director at the University of Iowa Center for Gene Therapy of Cystic Fibrosis, as well as the head of the department of anatomy and cell biology. He is a well known scientist and inventor who created the first cloned ferret and has made huge strides in finding the cure for cystic fibrosis.
George Stamatoyannopoulos was a Greek geneticist who taught at the University of Washington.
Robert Williamson is a retired British-Australian molecular biologist who specialised in the mapping, gene identification, and diagnosis of human genetic disorders.
Johanna Rommens is a Canadian geneticist who was on the research team which identified and cloned the CFTR gene, which when mutated, is responsible for causing cystic fibrosis (CF). She later discovered the gene responsible for Shwachman-Diamond syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes pancreatic and hematologic problems. She is a Senior Scientist Emeritus at SickKids Research Institute and a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto.
Harmit Singh Malik is an Indian American evolutionary biologist who is a professor and associate director at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. He was awarded the 2022 Genetics Society of America Edward Novitski Prize.
