Andreas Gnirke, Ph.D.

Andreas Gnirke is director of molecular biology R&D at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he is an institute scientist. Gnirke is a major thought leader in DNA sequencing and an influential technical and intellectual leader at the Broad. Gnirke has forged collaborations with other Broad scientists to 1) devise new library construction methods that enabled breakthrough genetic and evolutionary analyzes of human, vertebrate, and microbial genomes; 2) design and optimize methods for defining nucleotide sequence and genome structure at the epigenetic level; and 3) apply his encyclopedic knowledge of molecular biology and old-school genomics to help uncover the causal mutation behind the degenerative disease now called MUC1 kidney disease in an extremely challenging region of the human genome.

Gnirke was given the Broad’s Institute Award for his invention and sharing of many novel methods, including solution hybrid selection for targeted massively parallel DNA sequencing, which has profoundly changed the way that human and microbial genomes and epigenomes are analyzed at the Broad and beyond.

Prior to joining the Broad, Gnirke worked at Mercator Genetics Inc., where he oversaw genomics technology development and his expertise in physical mapping led to the positional cloning of the hereditary hemochromatosis gene. He played a similar role at Exelixis Inc., where he supported the company’s comparative and functional genomics based gene discovery efforts in model organisms.

Gnirke completed graduate work at the Free University Berlin, Germany, and postdoctoral training at Washington University in St. Louis, where he developed methods for genome mapping and pioneered the use of large insert clones for functional studies of large genome segments.