The new standard for molecular diagnostics.

Feng Zhang, Ph.D.

Co-Founder
Chair of Advisory Board

Feng Zhang, Ph.D., is an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Core Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT.

Dr. Zhang is a molecular biologist developing and applying molecular technologies for studying the molecular and genetic basis of diseases and providing treatment. He played a seminal role in developing optogenetics, a powerful technology for dissecting neural circuits using light. He is most well known for pioneering the development of CRISPR-Cas systems for gene editing and molecular diagnostics.

Dr. Zhang’s contributions to science have been recognized by numerous awards including the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Tang Prize, the Keio Medical Prize, the Lemelson-MIT Prize, and the Albany Medical Center Prize. He is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Zhang received his A.B. in chemistry and physics from Harvard and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford.

Jim Collins, Ph.D.

Co-Founder
Director

Jim Collins, Ph.D., is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, as well as a member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology faculty. He is also a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Dr. Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and his research group is currently focused on using synthetic biology to create next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics. Dr. Collins’s patented technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies, and he has helped launch a number of companies, including Synlogic and Senti Biosciences.

He has received numerous awards and honors, including a Rhodes Scholarship, a MacArthur “Genius” Award, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the Sanofi-Institut Pasteur Award, as well as several teaching awards. Dr. Collins is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine as well as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Inventors, and the World Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Collins received a B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Oxford.

David R. Walt, Ph.D.

Co-Founder
Director

David R. Walt, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert in nanoscience and diagnostics. He is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard Medical School, a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, a professor of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. Previously, Dr. Walt was University Professor at Tufts University, where he was a faculty member in the chemistry department. Dr. Walt is the scientific founder of Illumina Inc., where he served on the board for 18 years, and Quanterix Corporation. He co-founded several other life sciences startups, including Ultivue, Inc., and Arbor Biotechnologies. His laboratory was the first to introduce the idea of digital protein detection by developing a high throughput technology for performing single molecule analysis.

Dr. Walt has published more than 350 peer-reviewed papers and has over 100 U.S. patents. He has received numerous national and international awards and honors for his fundamental and applied work in the field of optical microwell arrays and single molecules. In addition to fundamental work on single molecules, Dr. Walt’s lab focuses on solving important clinical problems in areas that lack available biomarkers due to the inadequate sensitivity of existing assay technologies.

Dr. Walt is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and the National Academy of Inventors. He received a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in chemical biology from SUNY at Stony Brook. Dr. Walt completed his postdoctoral studies at MIT.

Omar Abudayyeh, Ph.D.

Co-Founder

Omar Abudayyeh, Ph.D., is a McGovern Institute Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and previously conducted research as a graduate student at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.

Dr. Abudayyeh’s doctoral work in Dr. Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute began with a focus on trying to uncover novel CRISPR enzymes for biotechnological applications. He helped with the discovery of multiple genome and transcriptome editing enzymes and developed several landmark applications for therapeutics and diagnostics. Dr. Abudayyeh’s discoveries have resulted in more than 15 patents or pending patent applications, which have been licensed to multiple biotechnology companies.

Dr. Abudayyeh has held multiple fellowships including the Friends of the McGovern Institute Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. He is also a recipient of the NIH F30 National Research Service Award. He has published seven co-first author papers with 23 publications overall and more than 4,000 citations in journals including Nature, Science, and Cell. In recognition of his work in 2018, he was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 award in the healthcare category and for Business Insider’s 30 Under 30 award.

Dr. Abudayyeh graduated from MIT in 2012 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering and biological engineering. He was a Henry Ford II Scholar (top graduating engineer) and a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar. Dr. Abudayyeh earned his Ph.D. at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He also completed his first two years of medical study at Harvard Medical School as part of the M.D./Ph.D. program and is currently on a leave of absence.

Todd Golub, M.D.

Co-Founder

Todd Golub, M.D., is a founding core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He serves as the Institute’s chief scientific officer and director of its cancer program.

Dr. Golub is a world leader in understanding the basis of cancer by creating and applying genomic tools. He has made fundamental discoveries in the molecular basis of childhood leukemia and laid the foundation for the diagnosis and classification of human cancers using genomics. He also pioneered the development of genomics-based approaches to drug discovery.

Dr. Golub is the Charles A. Dana Investigator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

He is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Erasmus Hematology Award, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Memorial Award and the Outstanding Achievement Award from the American Association for Cancer Research, the Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the E. Mead Johnson Award from the Society for Pediatric Research, and the Judson Daland Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Clinical Investigation from the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, he was elected as a member to the National Academy of Medicine.

Dr. Golub has served on the scientific advisory boards of numerous organizations, including serving as chair of the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital Scientific Advisory Board and the Board of Scientific Advisors of the National Cancer Institute. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation and is a trustee of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Dr. Golub is also the founder of several successful biotech companies including H3 Biomedicine, FORMA Therapeutics, and Foundation Medicine.

Jonathan Gootenberg, Ph.D.

Co-Founder

Jonathan Gootenberg, Ph.D., is a McGovern Institute Fellow at MIT. He was formerly a graduate student in the Feng Zhang lab at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, where he helped discover and apply the first RNA-targeting single effector CRISPR protein—the basis of the SHERLOCK^TM technology at the heart of Sherlock Biosciences.

Through his research, Dr. Gootenberg has helped to significantly advance the field of genome editing through the discovery of new CRISPR proteins, including the characterization of novel genome editing applications and enzymes for both therapeutic and diagnostic applications. His work has generated more than 15 patents or pending patent applications, which have been licensed to multiple biotechnology companies.

Dr. Gootenberg is a recipient of the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and the National Defense Science and Engineering Fellowship. He has published 23 papers with over 7,000 cumulative citations, including six co-first author papers in the journals Cell, Science, and Nature. He has been recognized for his work as part of Forbes’s 30 Under 30 award in the healthcare category and Business Insider’s 30 Under 30 award.

He earned a dual bachelor’s degree in mathematics and biological engineering from MIT, where he served as the president of the undergraduate biological engineering board. Dr. Gootenberg earned his Ph.D. in systems biology from Harvard University.

Deborah Hung, M.D., Ph.D.

Co-Founder

Dr. Deborah Hung works at the interface of chemical biology, genomics, and bacterial pathogenesis to establish new paradigms for an antibiotic based on the essential biology required for a pathogen to cause disease within the host. Using her training as a synthetic chemist, bacterial geneticist, and clinical physician, she explores approaches to disrupting the pathogen-host interaction.

Dr. Hung is a physician-scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Department of Molecular Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and is the Co-Director of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at the Broad Institute. She is an attending physician at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in infectious diseases and critical care medicine.

Pardis Sabeti, M.D., Ph.D.

Co-Founder

Pardis Sabeti, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor at the Center for Systems Biology and Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health, an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Her computational genomic lab has contributed to widely varying fields — including human evolutionary biology, viral sequencing, information theory, rural disease surveillance, and education efforts in West Africa. The lab aims to create comprehensive approaches for detecting, containing, and treating deadly infectious diseases, including Lassa virus, Ebola virus, Zika virus, and Babesiosis microtia. Dr. Sabeti has invested in capacity building and education throughout the continent, enabling the first diagnoses of Ebola in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, training over 70 African scientists through summer-long educational programs, and establishing genome centers in West Africa.

Born in Tehran, Dr. Sabeti immigrated to the United States at the age of two. She completed her undergraduate degree in biology at MIT and her doctorate at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After that, she obtained her medical degree summa cum laude from Harvard Medical School as a Soros Fellow. Dr. Sabeti has received numerous awards and honors including World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leader, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Natural Science, TIME’s “Person of the Year” as one of the Ebola fighters, and TIME’s “100 Most Influential.”

She is also the host of “Against All Odds,” which is included as part of the AP Statistics curriculum nationwide, and is the lead singer of the rock band Thousand Days.