David Botstein

David Botstein
File:Plos botstein.jpg
Born	8 September 1942 Zurich, Switzerland
Fields	Biology
Institutions	MIT Stanford University Genentech Princeton University
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Michigan
Thesis	The Synthesis and Maturation of Phage-P22 DNA (1967)
Doctoral students	Olga Troyanskaya Nikolai Slavov Fred Winston Mark Rose Douglas Koshland Chris Kaiser
Other notable students	Michael Eisen (postdoc)
Notable awards	Eli Lilly and Company Award in Microbiology (1978) Genetics Society of America Medal (1988) Allan Award of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989) Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003) Albany Medical Center Prize (2010) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013)
Website www.princeton.edu/genomics/botstein molbio.princeton.edu/faculty/molbio-faculty/96-botstein

David Botstein (born 8 September 1942) is an American biologist serving as the Chief Scientific Officer of Calico. He served as the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University from 2003–2013, where he remains an Anthony B. Evnin Professor of Genomics.

Education

Botstein graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959, and Harvard University in 1963. He started his Ph.D. work under Maurice Sanford Fox at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then moved and received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 for work on P22 phage.

Career

Botstein taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics. Botstein joined Genentech, Inc. in 1987 as Vice President-Science. In 1990, he became Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. Dr. Botstein was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1993.

Botstein is the director of the Integrated Science Program at Princeton University. Many Integrated Science students have gone on to be successful in the field of molecular biology.

In 1980, Botstein and his colleagues Ray White, Mark Skolnick, and Ronald W. Davis proposed a method for constructing a genetic linkage map using restriction fragment length polymorphisms that was used in subsequent years to identify several human disease genes including Huntington's and BRCA1. Variations of this method were used in the mapping efforts that predated and enabled the sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project.

In 1998, Botstein and his postdoctoral fellow Michael Eisen, together with graduate student Paul Spellman and colleague Patrick Brown, developed a statistical method and graphical interface that is widely used to interpret genomic data including microarray data. He has subsequently worked on the creation of the influential Gene Ontology with Michael Ashburner and Suzanna Lewis. He is one of the founding editors of the journal Molecular Biology of the Cell, along with Erkki Ruoslahti and Keith Yamamoto.

In 2013, Botstein was named Chief Scientific Officer of Google's anti-aging health startup Calico.

Awards

Botstein has won the Eli Lilly and Company Award in Microbiology (1978), the Genetics Society of America Medal (1988, with Ira Herskowitz), the Allan Award of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989, with Ray White), the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003) and the Albany Medical Center Prize (2010, with Eric Lander and Francis Collins). In 2013 he was awarded the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for his work.

Personal

Botstein is an alumnus of Camp Rising Sun. He is the brother of the conductor Leon Botstein. Both of Botstein's parents were physicians.

External links

• David Botstein's talk: "An Integrated Science Curriculum"
• David Botstein iBiology Seminar: "Fruits of the Genome Sequence"

Academic offices
Preceded by Shirley Tilghman	Director Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics Princeton University 2003-2015	Succeeded by Michael Levine