Harris Lewin

Harris Lewin
Awards	Wolf Prize in Agriculture
Academic background
Alma mater	Cornell University University of California, Davis
Thesis	(1984)
Academic work
Institutions	University of Illinois University of California, Davis
Main interests	biologist
Notable ideas	genomics and immunogenetics

Harris Lewin, an American biologist, is a professor of evolution and ecology and Robert and Rosabel Osborne Endowed Chair at the University of California, Davis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, Lewin won the Wolf Prize in Agriculture for his research into cattle genomics.

Lewin studied at Cornell University and earned his B.S. in Animal Science in 1979 and M.S. in Animal Breeding and Genetics in 1981. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Immunology from the University of California, Davis in 1984. He then worked at the University of Illinois. In 2003, he served as the founding director of the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. In 2009, he and a team of researchers fully sequenced the cow genome. Lewin served as vice chancellor for research at University of California, Davis from 2011 until 2016. In 2016 he returned to the faculty in the University of California, Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and the Genome Center. Lewin is a member of a group biologists that propose to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth. Lewin was senior author of a study that revealed one of the most prolific bulls in the history of Holstein cattle breeding, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, had a lethal gene mutation estimated to have caused half million spontaneous cow abortions worldwide. Lewin collaborated with researchers from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in France for a study that used RNA-sequencing to highlight problems with gene expression in cloned cattle. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lewin and his colleagues used an algorithm to computationally recreate the chromosomes of the first eutherian mammal, the long-extinct, shrewlike ancestor of all placental mammals.

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