Goals and Approach

The Shendure Lab is part of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.  The lab’s mission is to develop and apply new technologies at the interface of genomics, molecular biology and developmental biology. Most of its work exploits next-generation DNA sequencing, which has emerged as a broadly enabling microscope for the measurement of biological phenomena.  

Jay Shendure, MD, PhD is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Lead Scientific Director of the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology (Allen-CZI-UW) and Scientific Director of the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine. His 2005 doctoral thesis with George Church included one of the first successful reductions to practice of next-generation DNA sequencing. Dr. Shendure’s laboratory at UW pioneered exome sequencing and its earliest applications to gene discovery for Mendelian disorders and autism; cell-free DNA diagnostics for cancer and reproductive medicine; massively parallel reporter assays, saturation genome editing; combinatorial single cell molecular technologies; and genome editing-based molecular recording technologies.  

Dr. Shendure is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the recipient of the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics (2012), the Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences (2019) and the Mendel Award from the European Society of Human Genetics (2022). Dr. Shendure serves or previously served as a scientific advisor to the NIH Director (ACD), US Precision Medicine Initiative, National Human Genome Research Institute, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Gladstone Institutes, New York Genome Center, Allen Institute and openRxiv, and is on the board of directors of the Hypothesis Fund. He received his BA from Princeton University (1996) and his MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School (2007).