Eric Lander

On May 25, 2020, Pope Francis appointed him a member of the Pontifical Academy of Science.

On February 6, 2017, Lander received a honoris causa doctorate from the Université catholique de Louvain.

In 2017 he also received the William Allan Award from the American Society of Human Genetics.

In addition to his research, he has for several years co-taught MIT's required undergraduate introductory biology course (7.012) with Robert Weinberg. Since 2013, he is also teaching 2 online courses named "Quantitative Biology Workshop" and "7.00x Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life" via the EdX platform by working together with the MITx Bio group headed by Mary Ellen Wiltrout.

In 2013, Lander was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.

In December 2008, he was named, along with Harold E. Varmus, one of the co-chairs of the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in the Obama administration. In 2012 he was awarded the Dan David Prize.

Lander was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people of our time (2004) for his work on the HGP. Lander has also appeared in numerous PBS documentaries about genetics. He was listed at #2 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT.

In 2001, a draft of the human genome was published in the journal Nature. The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Center for Genome Research, was listed first (the order was according to total genomic sequence contributed). Lander was the first author named.

In 1999, Lander received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

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

He later became acquainted with David Botstein, a geneticist working at MIT. Botstein was working on a way to unravel how subtle differences in complex genetic systems can become disorders like cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia, and even obesity. The two collaborated to develop a computer algorithm to analyze the maps of genes. Lander then joined the Whitehead Institute in 1986; that same year, he became an assistant professor at MIT. Lander was awarded the prestigious 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, it 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 that Lander spearheaded.

Lander attended Princeton University, where he graduated in 1978 as valedictorian. He completed his senior thesis, titled "On the structure of projective modules", under supervision of John Coleman Moore. He then attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and he wrote his Doctor of Philosophy thesis on algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs, under the supervision of Peter Cameron.

Lander was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in a Jewish family, the son of Harold and Rhoda Lander who were both lawyers. He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School and an International Mathematical Olympiad Silver Medalist for the United States, graduating from high school in 1974. He attended and later taught at the Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics program. At the age of seventeen, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers for which he won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957), a mathematician and geneticist, is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, former member of the Whitehead Institute, and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He was co-chair of U.S. President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is a 1987 MacArthur Fellow.