Jef Boeke is the founding director of The Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health and is known for foundational work on mechanistic and genomic aspects of retrotransposition. He is a pioneer of synthetic genome construction, as he synthesized the first artificial yeast chromosomes de novo. He also leads an international consortium that built the highly engineered genome of the first synthetic eukaryote, Yeast 2.0. Using Big DNA technology to build mammalian gene loci in yeast and then delivering those loci and their variants to stem cells, Boeke and his team are working to understand the “instruction manuals” that specify how human genes are expressed in the context of the Dark Matter Project. This research has informed technology that enables the rapid design and development of humanized mouse models for studying the treatment of diseases.
Boeke has founded several biotechnology companies, including Avigen Inc., CDI Labs, and Neochromosome, Inc. His lab developed a highly automated RT-PCR workflow and software infrastructure that was central to a COVID-19 testing pipeline deployed by another company he helped found, the Pandemic Response Lab.
His academic training was at Bowdoin College (A.B. in Biochemistry 1977) and Rockefeller University (Ph.D. in Molecular Biology 1982), and he performed postdoctoral work with Gerald Fink at the Whitehead Institute (1982-1985).
