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.

Lander was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Jewish parents, the son of Rhoda G. Lander, a social studies teacher, and Harold Lander, an attorney. He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School, graduating in 1974 as valedictorian and an International Mathematical Olympiad Silver Medalist for the U.S. At age 17, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers, for which he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

After graduating from Stuyvesant High School as valedictorian in 1974, Lander graduated from Princeton University in 1978 as valedictorian and with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics. He completed his senior thesis, "On the structure of projective modules", under John Coleman Moore's supervision. He then moved to the University of Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar and student of Wolfson College, Oxford. 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.

During his career, Lander has worked on human genetic variation, human population history, genome evolution, non-coding RNAs, three-dimensional folding of the human genome and genome-wide association studies to discover the genes essential for biological processes using CRISPR-based editing.

As a mathematician, Lander studied combinatorics and applications of representation theory to coding theory. He enjoyed mathematics but did not wish to spend his life in such a "monastic" career. Unsure what to do next, he took a job teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School. At the suggestion of his brother, developmental biologist Arthur Lander, he started to look at neurobiology, saying at the time, "because there's a lot of information in the brain". To understand mathematical neurobiology, he felt he had to study cellular neurobiology; this, in turn, led to studying microbiology and eventually genetics. "When I finally feel I have learned genetics, I should get back to these other problems. But I'm still trying to get the genetics right", Lander said.

Lander later became acquainted with David Botstein, a geneticist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Botstein was working on a way to unravel how subtle differences in complex genetic systems can become disorders such as cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and even obesity. The two collaborated to develop a computer algorithm to analyze the maps of genes. In 1986 Lander joined the Whitehead Institute and became an assistant professor at MIT. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. In 1990, he founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research (WICGR). The WICGR became one of the world's leading centers of genome research, and under Lander's leadership made great progress in developing new methods of analyzing mammalian genomes. It also made important breakthroughs in applying this information to the study of human genetic variation and formed the basis for the foundation of the Broad Institute—a transformation Lander spearheaded.

In 1989, Lander provided expert testimony in the New York criminal case People v. Castro. He showed that the then-current method of interpreting DNA evidence was liable to give false positive matches, implicating innocent defendants. Two of the defense attorneys in that case, Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, went on to found the Innocence Project, an organization that uses DNA analysis to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners. Lander is a member of the Innocence Project's board of directors.