Eric Lander

Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957), a mathematician and geneticist, is a Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), former member of the Whitehead Institute, and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard who has devoted his career to realizing the promise of the human genome for medicine. He is co-chair of U.S. President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Early life and education

Lander was 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. At the age of seventeen, he wrote a paper on quasiperfect numbers for which he won the Westinghouse Prize.

Lander attended Princeton University, where he graduated in 1978 as valedictorian. He then attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and he wrote his doctoral D.Phil. thesis on algebraic coding theory and symmetric block designs, under the supervision of Peter Cameron.