David Root

David Root, Ph.D.

David Root

David Root is senior director of the Genetic Perturbation Platform and the Functional Genomics Consortium (previously The RNAi Consortium – TRC) at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he is also an institute scientist. Since launching this platform and consortium at the Broad in 2004, Root and his colleagues have created some of the world’s most-used libraries and tools for RNA interference, gene expression, and CRISPR-based screens, and have pioneered methods to employ these and other tools for functional genomics.

In addition to developing new strategies and tools for functional genomics, Root and his team collaborate with scientists in the Broad community at Harvard, MIT, and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals for gene function discovery in diverse areas of biology. Dozens of genetic screen projects with researchers in the Broad community and throughout the world have led to new findings in cancer, immunology, metabolism, infectious disease, and many other areas of normal and disease biology.

Root was previously assistant professor of physical chemistry at Swarthmore College, and then shifted to biological research with postdoctoral work in Brent Stockwell’s laboratory at the Whitehead Institute.

Root received his B.A. in chemistry from Swarthmore College and Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Stanford University.

July 2018