About
George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Through his Harvard laboratory, Church has co-founded around 50 biotechnology companies. In 2018, the Church laboratory at Harvard spun off 16 biotechnology companies in one year. The Church laboratory works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, information processing, medical genetics, aging, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church laboratory have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies.
In 2017, Time magazine listed him in Time 100, the list of 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was featured among the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma. As of January 2023, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
