World-renowned scientist gives Göran Gustafsson lecture
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Eric Lander, one of our time’s most influential and cited researchers, visits Uppsala on 7 December to give this year’s Göran Gustafsson lecture in medicine. He is also chairman of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Eric Lander is professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founder and director of Broad Institute, the incredibly successful biomedical centre which unites MIT and Harvard and constitutes a role model for the establishment of SciLifeLab in Uppsala and Stockholm. There, biomedical problems are tackled in a new way with new technologies, analytical methods and an interdisciplinary way of thinking.
He is also chairman of President Oabama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where his broad knowledge of mathematics, economics and science is a great resource.
Eric Lander was ranked in 2004 by Time magazine as one of our time’s 100 most influential people, largely due to his important contribution to the development of large-scale genomics projects which have led to a gigantic expansion of knowledge in both biology and medicine. He is also one of the world’s most cited scientists, and has for the last ten years often been ranked among the ten ‘Hottest Scientists in Life Science’.
Lander has significantly contributed to a large number of crucial break-throughs in genetics, genomics and oncogenomics, for instance:
- Mapping and sequencing the genome of humans and mice, as well as disease genes in humans
- Molecular characterisation of cancer
- Studies of the function and evolution of the genome
He as often been a driving force behind large international projects and has laid the foundations for others’ discoveries by developing biomedical tools and methods.