Bio:

Gerald Rubin is a Senior Group Leader at The Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he served as founding director from 2003 to 2020. He obtained his BS at MIT and PhD at University of Cambridge and is an emeritus professor of genetics and development at UC Berkeley. He is known for his studies of genetics, genomics, developmental biology, and neuroscience in the fruit fly Drosophila. In 1982, he and Allan Spradling developed methods for making transgenic Drosophila, an advance that had a profound effect on research using the fruit fly. His laboratory at Berkeley did pioneering studies using genetic approaches to discover components of signaling pathways acting downstream of tyrosine kinases. He later led the publicly funded effort to sequence the Drosophila genome, collaborating with Celera Genomics to achieve this goal in 2000. His more recent work focuses on the anatomy and function of the Drosophila brain. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (London). He has received numerous awards, including the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, the National Academy of Sciences U.S. Steel Foundation Award in Molecular Biology, the Genetics Society of America Medal, and the Gruber Neuroscience Prize.