Dr Jef Boeke

Dr Jef Boeke, the founding director of The Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health, is known for foundational work on mechanistic and genomic aspects of retrotransposition. He is a pioneer of synthetic genome construction, as he synthesized the first artificial yeast chromosome de novo. He also leads an international consortium that built the highly engineered genome of the first synthetic eukaryote, Yeast 2.0. Using big DNA technology to build mammalian gene loci in yeast and then delivering those loci and their variants to stem cells, Dr. Boeke and his team are working to understand the “instruction manuals” that specify how human genes are expressed. This research has informed technology that enables the rapid design and development of humanized mouse models for studying the treatment of diseases. Boeke has founded several biotechnology companies, including Avigen Inc., CDI Labs, and Neochromosome, Inc. Most recently, his lab developed a highly automated RT-PCR workflow and software infrastructure that is central to a COVID testing pipeline deployed by another company he helped found, the Pandemic Response Lab.