2008 Commencement Guest Speaker

Dr. J. Craig Venter

He is Founder, Chairman, and President of the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), a not-for-profit, research organization with more than 400 scientists and staff dedicated to human, microbial, plant, synthetic, and environmental genomic research, as well as the exploration of social and ethical issues in genomics.

After a tour of duty as a Navy Corpsman in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, Dr. Venter earned both a Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology from the University of California at San Diego. After leaving UCSD, he was appointed professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. In 1984, he moved to the National Institutes of Health campus where he developed Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs,) a revolutionary new strategy for rapid gene discovery. In 1992 Dr. Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), a not-for-profit research institute, where in 1995 he and his team decoded the genome of the first free-living organism, the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, using his new whole genome shotgun technique. In 1998, Dr. Venter founded Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome with his new techniques. This research culminated with the February 2001 publication of the human genome in the journal, Science. He and his team there also sequenced the fruit fly, mouse and rat genomes. Dr. Venter and his team at the Venter Institute continue to blaze new trails in genomics research and have published more than 50 genomes and numerous important papers covering such areas as environmental genomics, synthetic genomics and the first complete diploid genome.