Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, has been named White House science advisor to President-elect Joseph Biden. He will specifically be nominated as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and serve as Presidential Science Advisor. The President-elect is designating the Presidential Science Advisor as a member of the Cabinet for the first time in history. Lander was a principal leader of the Human Genome Project, and during the Obama Administration he served as external co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Lander will step down from his roles at Broad, Harvard, and MIT and take an unpaid, academic leave of absence.
The Broad Institute's board has appointed Todd Golub, current chief scientific officer at the institute, as director. Golub is a founder and core member of the institute, and serves on its executive leadership team. He is also the Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Golub joined the Dana-Farber and Harvard faculty in 1997, and served as a key scientific leader of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, the precursor organization of the Broad Institute. He has also been Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and has served as chair of numerous scientific advisory boards, including St. Jude Children's Research Hospital and the National Cancer Institute's scientific advisory board.
