Bruce Birren

Bruce Birren is director of the Microbial Sequencing Center and co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis program at the Broad Institute. He has been involved in the genomewide mapping and sequencing programs for human and mouse and directed sequencing projects for numerous microbial genomes, including bacteria, viruses, parasites, and insect vectors of disease. Since 2001, Bruce has led the institute’s Fungal Genome Initiative, a comprehensive program to generate and analyze fungal genome sequences.

At the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, Bruce was a member of the pilot project for human genome sequencing that pioneered high-throughput methods for large-scale sequencing. The Center, which is now part of the Broad Institute, was the leading contributor of DNA sequence to the public databases for the Human Genome Project.

After receiving his Ph.D. in molecular biology, Bruce completed his postdoctoral training at Caltech, where his work focused on developing new instrumentation and methods for isolating and manipulating large DNA fragments. He was also co-developer of the BAC system for cloning large DNA fragments in bacteria.

Bruce is the author of more than 70 papers on mapping, sequencing, and genome analysis. He authored a laboratory manual on pulsed-field gel electrophoresis, and co-edited a four-volume laboratory manual from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press on genome analysis.