About Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957) 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. Lander received a MacArthur Fellowship. He founded the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research, was a principal leader of the Human Genome Project, and was the founding director of the Broad Institute. He was Science Advisor to the President for Presidents Obama and Biden. At age 17, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers, for which he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by the University of Oxford in 1980 with a thesis on algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs supervised by Peter Cameron. Lander later became acquainted with David Botstein, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
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