Dr. Eric Lander appointed co-chair of OICR's Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. Eric Lander
(Image courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) has appointed world-renowned genome scientist Dr. Eric Lander co-chair of its Scientific Advisory Board.
Lander is Director of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University and co-chair of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. The first author on the draft sequence of the human genome published in 2001, Lander has since devoted his scientific career to ushering in a new era of personalized medicine.
“We are incredibly pleased to have Dr. Lander, a scientific leader at the height of a very remarkable career, join our scientific advisory board,” said Dr. Tom Hudson, President and Scientific Director of OICR. “He will no doubt bring great insights in his role as an advisor to our fast-growing Institute.”
The Scientific Advisory Board is a body of international scientific experts who give advice and guidance on the Institute’s strategy for becoming a centre of research excellence in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. Lander will co-chair the board with Dr. Elizabeth Eisenhauer, a clinician-scientist and distinguished clinical trials expert at the NCIC-Clinical Trials Group at Queen’s University in Kingston who has served as co-chair with Dr. Phillip Sharp since 2008.
Sharp, a professor at MIT, is retiring as co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Board. “We would like to thank Dr. Sharp for his service to the Scientific Advisory Board. His advice has been of benefit to OICR’s Strategic Plan and all our scientific planning toward building a centre of cancer research excellence in Ontario,” Hudson said.
Lander trained as a mathematician before discovering an interest in neurobiology and, later, in human genetics. In 1990 he founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, which contributed the largest portion of the draft sequence of the human genome published in the journal Nature 2001. He personally led the group of bioinformatics specialists who produced an analysis of the draft genome for publication and wrote much of the breakthrough article himself.
In 2005 he founded the Broad Institute, a collaboration between MIT, Harvard and the Whitehead that aims to enhance the understanding and treatment of disease by creating tools for genome medicine and making them broadly available to the scientific community. He is currently co-director of the Broad Institute and a Professor of Biology at MIT and of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School.
Lander is a well-known advocate for genomics and personalized medicine. Throughout his career he has appeared in numerous PBS documentaries and given many public lectures to promote the idea that knowledge about the human genome could soon revolutionize medicine. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and National Institute of Medicine in the U.S.
In April, President Obama announced a new role for the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, with Lander and Dr. Harold Varmus, President of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and former Director of the National Institutes of Health, as co-chairs. The Council will now be charged with advising the President on national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation in the United States.
