Eric Lander
Eric Steven Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute (a collaboration between MIT and Harvard) and director of its genome biology program. As one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, Lander is exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying the basis of human disease. He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School, and graduated in 1974, and participated in the Achievement Summit in Salt Lake City as a high school delegate. Lander then attended Princeton, and graduated as valedictorian. He went on to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he wrote his doctorate in symmetric designs. As a mathematician, he studied applications of representation theory to coding theory. Lander enjoyed mathematics but did not wish to spend his life in a "monastic career." Unsure of what to do next, he took a job teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School; he began to write a book on information theory. As the suggestion of his brother, he started