Eric Lander on Life Outside of Science: Family
  Eric Lander     Biography    
Recorded: 02 Jun 2003

Do I have hobbies? My children are my greatest hobby. I mean I have three wonderful children, a daughter and two sons. And I don’t have time for many other hobbies. I love traveling. I love hiking. I do it with the kids and my wife, Laurie. And so if I have to pick one hobby, it’s my kids. I love woodworking, but I don’t get to do it very much. And my hope is maybe now to get a little more time to do woodworking. But, you know, every spare moment I have I want to spend with my kids. So that is my hobby.

Eric Lander earned his A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University (1978) and D.Phil. in mathematics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University (1981).

He first came to the Whitehead Institute as a Whitehead Fellow in 1986, while still an assistant professor of managerial economics at the Harvard Business School and is currently Director of the Whitehead Center for Genome Research and Professor of Biology at MIT. As director of the Whitehead Center for Genome Research, Dr Lander has been one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, contributing 30 percent of the total sequence of the human genome and developing and making freely available many of the key tools used in modern mammalian genomics.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and has been awarded the Beckman Prize for Lab Automation, the Chiron Prize for Biotechnology, and the Gairdner Award for his outstanding contribution to genomic research.

Lander has attended every human genome meeting at CSHL. At the request of Jim Watson, Lander gave his first lecture at the 1986 CSHL symposium on the Molecular Biology of Homo Sapiens.