George M. Church

George M. Church
George Church in 2012
Born	George McDonald Church (1954-08-28) August 28, 1954 (age 62) MacDill Air Force Base, Florida
Residence	Boston, Massachusetts
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	United States
Fields	Chemistry
Institutions	Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Alma mater	Duke University (BA) Harvard University (PhD)
Thesis	Genetic Elements within Yeast Mitochondrial and Mouse Immunoglobulin Introns (1984)
Doctoral advisor	Walter Gilbert
Known for	Father of synthetic biology
Notable awards	Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2011) Bower award (2011)
Spouse	Ting Wu
Website arep.med.harvard.edu/gmc

George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist. As of 2015^[update], he is Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT, and was a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. As of March 2017, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.

George McDonald Church was born on August 28, 1954 on MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, and grew up in nearby Clearwater; he attended high school at the preparatory boarding school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1972. He then studied at Duke University, completing a bachelor's degree in zoology and chemistry in two years.

In the fall of 1973, Church began research work at Duke University with assistant professor of biochemistry, Sung-Hou Kim, work that continued a year later with Church in a graduate biochemistry program at Duke on an NSF fellowship. As Peter Miller reported for the National Geographic series, "The Innovators":

"As a graduate student at Duke… he used x-ray crystallography to study the three-dimensional structure of "transfer" RNA, which decodes DNA and carries instructions to other parts of the cell. It was groundbreaking research, but Church spent so much time in the lab—up to a hundred hours a week—that he neglected his other classes [in the fall of 1975]".