Paul Blainey, Ph.D.

Paul Blainey is a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and a tenured associate professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT. He is an expert in microanalysis systems for studies of individual molecules and cells. Blainey is applying this technology to advance the understanding of DNA-protein interactions, evolutionary processes, functional differences between cells, disease processes, and drug target discovery.

The Blainey group develops and translates microfluidic, chemical, imaging, and genomics approaches to make high-throughput quantitative biology routine. Such capabilities will allow scientists to gain fundamental insights into many aspects of mammalian cell biology, microbial community function, and disease biology. Blainey seeks to empower researchers to obtain new types of information about biological specimens and integrate different types of information, such as imaging and genomic data.

Blainey is also the founding director of MIT’s BioMaker Space, which provides materials and space for students to explore biology in independent research projects.

Blainey was awarded the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2017 and the Agilent Early Career Investigator Award in 2014, and he was the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface in 2011.

Blainey holds a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Washington. He earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Harvard University, where he studied how proteins interact with DNA with Xiaoliang Sunney Xie and Greg Verdine. He then completed his postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Stephen Quake, where he pioneered optofluidic methods to perform single-cell microbial genome sequencing.

July 2019