MIT World Speakers

David Botstein

Botstein was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1963) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1967). He joined the faculty of MIT in 1967 and developed an innovative series of undergraduate courses called "project labs," which emphasized current research questions and cutting-edge techniques. In 1987 he moved to Genentech, Inc. as Vice President – Science, and in 1990 he joined Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he was Chairman of the Department of Genetics. In 2003 he became Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute of Integrative Genomics at Princeton University.

Dr. Botstein's research has centered on genetics, especially the use of genetic methods to understand biological functions. In 1980, Botstein and three colleagues proposed a method for mapping genes that laid the groundwork for the Human Genome Project. Dr. Botstein was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1993. He has served on many policy-making and peer-review committees, including the NAS/NRC study on the Human Genome Project (1987-88), the NIH Program Advisory Panel on the Human Genome (1989-90) and the Advisory Council of the National Center for Human Genome Research (1990-1995).