Rate My Professor David Botstein

David Botstein was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1963) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1967). He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, rising through the ranks from instructor to professor of genetics. In 1987, he moved to Genentech, Inc. as vice president–science, and in 1990 joined Stanford University’s School of Medicine, where he was chairman of the Department of Genetics. In July 2003 he became director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Anthony B. Evnin ’62 Professor of Genomics at Princeton University, serving in that role until 2013. Botstein taught at Princeton for 12 years before transferring to emeritus status in February 2015. He later served as chief scientific officer of Calico Life Sciences.

Botstein’s research centered on genetics, with a focus on using genetic methods to understand biological functions. His contributions included work on bacterial genetics and transposable elements, novel methods in budding yeast for studying cytoskeletal functions, and the proposal (with collaborators) that restriction fragment length polymorphisms could be used for linkage mapping of the human genome, laying foundations for the Human Genome Project. He participated in sequencing the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome, co-founded the Saccharomyces Genome Database, contributed to DNA microarray technology and its application to tumor classification, and helped develop the Integrated Science Curriculum and the Program in Quantitative and Computational Biology at Princeton. Botstein was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and the Institute of Medicine in 1993. He received numerous awards, including the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology (1978), the Genetics Society of America Medal (1988), the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003), the Albany Medical Center Prize (2010), the Dan David Prize (2012), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2013), and the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal (2020). He served on multiple national committees related to the Human Genome Project and other scientific advisory roles.

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