Craig Venter
President and founder J Craig Venter Institute
NVBMB Speaker of the Year 2011
Keynote: From Reading to Writing the
Genetic Code
Dr John Craig Venter is one of the most prolific scientists of
this time. When working at the National Institutes of Health he
developed Expressed Sequence Tags or ESTs, a revolutionary new
strategy for rapid gene discovery.
In 1992 Dr. Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where in 1995 he and his team decoded the genome of the first free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, using his new whole genome shotgun technique.
In 1998, he founded Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome using new tools and techniques he and his team developed. The successful completion of this research culminated with the February 2001 publication of the human genome.
Currently he leads the J Craig Venter Institute,
a research organisation of 400 scientists focusing on several
challenges in the fields of life sciences including synthetic
biology and global ocean sampling to identify millions of new
genes. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and
scientific awards including the 2008 National Medal of Science
and a member of many prestigious scientific organizations
including the National Academy of Sciences.
