Center for Causal Consequences Variation (CCV)

Our investigators

	Professor George Church (Harvard Medical School), CTCHGV’s proposed director, has several times developed innovations that exhibited improvement factors of 10 or more in scale or power compared to contemporaneous commercial collaborators. Indeed, Professor Church led a prior Molecular Genomics and Imaging CEGS (MGIC) that consistently developed improved sequencing methods ~2 years ahead of commercial efforts which later adapted many of our innovations: Under him, MGIC demonstrated his initial polymerase colony (polony) methods in 2003, versions of which are now widely used commercially (Illumina, ABI), while in 2005 MGIC developed sequencing by ligation, which is now in use in ABI SOLiD. Another example is in DNA synthesis, where he has led the way in synthesis and use of complex oligo mixtures cleaved from arrays for large construct assembly and targeted sequencing, and where in the course of four years he has advanced from 4000 90-mer to 54000 150-mer oligo arrays. In 2011, George Church won the prestigious Bower Award for Achievement in Science and was also elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
	Dr. George Q. Daley’s (Harvard Medical School, Children’s Hospital, HHMI) work has transformed the field of stem cell development and differentiation. Recipient of numerous awards, including the first NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, as well as major awards from the American Philosophical Society, Society for Pediatric Research, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, Dr. Daley’s work focuses on functional hematopoietic and germ cell elements from ES cells, and the genetic mechanisms that predispose to malignancy. Dr. Daley’s lab was one of the first three world-wide to derive human iPS cells, and the first to produce a repository of patient-specific iPS cells (from 10 different disease conditions).
	Dr. J. Keith Joung (Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital) is a leading expert on the development of gene-editing nucleases for human cell engineering and gene targeting. He is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award and is the Jim and Ann Orr Research Scholar at MGH. He is the leader and co-founder of the Zinc Finger Consortium (http://www.zincfingers.org/), which was established to ensure and to promote continued research and development of engineered zinc finger technology. Dr. Joung and his laboratory have developed zinc finger engineering platforms that are robust, user-friendly, and freely available to the academic scientific community. His group is also currently developing methods for rapid assembly of engineered TALEs and exploring applications of TALEs and TALE nucleases (TALENs) in human cells and model organisms. Keith Joung was featured in a Nature Methods’ Method of the Year 2011 article on Gene-editing nucleases.
	Professor Kun Zhang (UCSD) developed innovative methods for long range haplotyping, single cell genome sequencing, targeted sequencing, and measurement of allele-specific expression, as a post-doc in the Church Lab, where he was a member of the MGIC team. He has also worked with Professor Church on methods for targeted exon sequencing in connection with an NHLBI grant (HLB08-004).

Last modified: 1/31/2012 11:42 AM by John Aach