Erez Lieberman Aiden directs the recently established Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor. His wide-ranging work has involved both invention and theoretical science. While a graduate student at Harvard and MIT, he and colleagues burst onto the cover of Nature with the first clear demonstration that natural selection applies to the evolution of languages. With Martin Nowak, he is credited with the disovery of evolutionary graph theory, now widely used to understand the effects of structure on evolution.

Lieberman Aiden's contributions have won wide recognition. He won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for his work on the iShoe, a shoe to assist elderly people with balance problems, and in 2009 was named one of MIT Technology Review’s top 35 innovators under 35. He won the Hertz Thesis Prize and the American Physical Society’s outstanding thesis prize in biological physics for 2010 and was elected a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows upon receiving his PhD the same year. Science featured his articles laying out the folding principles of the genome and the analysis of culture using books digitized by Google. Awarded the NIH New Innovator Award in 2011, today he continues to work in culturomics while applying mathematical and computational approaches to the three-dimensional architectural of the human genome.