Thomas Gingeras

Director of Functional Genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Professor Gingeras received his Ph. D. degree from New York University and did his postdoctoral studies at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) under Nobel Laureate, Richard Roberts. He then became junior faculty member at CSHL where he developed the first DNA sequence assembly and gel scanning computer programs ever written. He left CSHL and became the Director of Molecular Biology at the Salk Institute for Biotechnology and Industrial Associates and then became a very early employee at Affymetrix (Vice President for Biological Sciences), the first company to build and commercialize DNA microarrays. During his tenure at Affymetrix he and his group developed arrays that interrogated the entire genomes of human and other model organisms. These analyses and the computational tools that were created, were used to map and interpret the transcriptional landscapes of many human cell types that led to the observation that all genomes encode not only protein coding genes and but even a larger number of non-coding RNA genes. The observations concerning the scale of expression and the biological importance of the non-coding genes were found to be the Scientific Discovery of the Year by Science magazine in 2010. After leaving Affymetrix in 2008, Professor Gingeras returned to CSHL as Professor and Head of Functional Genomics. During this tenure, he was a founding member of the NHGRI-funded Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project and has been a participant in related ENCODE projects for the past 15 years. During this period, Professor Gingeras’ laboratory has focused on investigating the organization of functional information encoded within genomes and to specifically characterize the functional roles of both short (<200 nucleotides) and long (>200 nucleotides) non-protein coding RNAs. The aims of this work have been to identify all the functional regions of the human genome and epigenome as well as to identify new mechanisms of regulating RNA expression. Finally, these efforts have been extended in order to identify and determine the biological roles of short RNAs cargoes present in vesicles released by almost all cells that are involved in intercellular communication. As an essential part of these efforts, Professor Gingeras has had a long standing interest in the development of new experimental methodologies as well as in algorithmic development leading to the release to the scientific community of several widely used software tools for the analysis of RNA expression. Professor Gingeras is the author of 150 peer-reviewed and 40 invited scientific publications and holds 30 U.S. patents. In addition to his current position at CSHL, has been an adjunct faculty member at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China (Genomics) and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, (Genetics/Genomics) and is a member of multiple Editorial, U.S. and foreign academic/ governmental and Scientific Advisory Committees.