George Church is a prolific, creative and entrepreneurial scientist and engineer whose work has repeatedly pushed forward the frontiers of genome science, biongineering and synthetic biology. In his 1984 Harvard doctoral research, Church developed the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing and barcode tagging, helping launch a “next generation” of sequencing technologies that eventually led to mapping of the human genome. This work also led directly to the first commercial genome sequence (for the human pathogen Helicobacter pylori) in 1994. His laboratory continues to develop genome-engineering technologies and is now leading experimentation witih CRISPR. In addition, Church founded the Personal Genome Project in 2005 and today is director of [PersonalGenomes.org](http://PersonalGenomes.org_, the world's only open-access database of information on human genomic, environmental and trait data. His lab’s innovations have resulted in the founding of companies in medical diagnostics (Knome, Alacris, AbVitro and Pathogenica) and synthetic biology and therapeutics (Joule, Gen9, Editas, Egenesis, enEvolv and WarpDrive). Church has also been active in developing privacy, biosafety and biosecurity policy. He is director of the NIH Center for Excellence in Genomic Science. He has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering and been awarded the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science of the Franklin Institute. He has coauthored 330 papers, 60 patents and a popular 2012 book (with Ed Regis), Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Twitter