Eric Lander

Eric Lander
Eric Lander speaks at the Mouse Genome Sequencing Press Conference on December 4, 2002
Born	(1957-02-03) February 3, 1957 (age 59) Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Institutions	Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alma mater	Princeton University St John's College, Oxford
Thesis	Topics in algebraic coding theory (1980)
Doctoral advisor	Peter Cameron
Notable awards	MacArthur Fellowship (1987) Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service (1998) Dickson Prize (1997) Gairdner Award (2002) Harvey Prize (2012) Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013)

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 was co-chair of U.S. President Barack Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

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.

As a mathematician, Lander studied combinatorics and applications of representation theory to coding theory. He enjoyed mathematics, but did not wish to spend his life in such a "monastic" career. Unsure of what to do next, he took up a job teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School; Lander also began writing a book on information theory. At the suggestion of his brother, developmental biologist Arthur Lander, he started to look at neurobiology "because there's a lot of information in the brain." In order to understand mathematical neurobiology, he felt he had to study cellular neurobiology; in turn, this led to studying microbiology and eventually, genetics. "When I finally feel I have learned genetics, I should get back to these other problems. But I'm still trying to get the genetics right."