Charles Peter DeLisi (born December 9, 1941) is an American biomedical scientist and the Metcalf Professor of Science and Engineering at Boston University. He is noted for major contributions to the initiation of the Human Genome Project, for transformative academic leadership, and for research contributions to mathematical and computational immunology, cell biophysics, genomics and protein and nucleic acid structure and function. Recent activities include mathematical finance and climate change. Early life and education DeLisi was born in the Bronx, graduated from City College of New York (CCNY) with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history (1963), and received his Ph.D. in physics (1965 -1969) from New York University (NYU). Career and research In 1969 he joined Donald Crothers’ laboratory as a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral research fellow in the department of chemistry at Yale University. In 1972 he was appointed a theoretical division staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he collaborated with George Bell, a theoretical physicist who a few years earlier had begun pioneering research in mathematical immunology. DeLisi was subsequently appointed senior scientist (1975–1982) at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, and founding head of the Section on Theoretical Immunology (1982–1985), where he and his collaborators established one of the earliest protein and DNA sequence databases fully integrated with machine learning programs for functional inference and developed a number of analytical methods that proved useful in cell biology. In 1986, as director of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Health and Environmental Research Programs, DeLisi and his advisors proposed the Human Genome Project to the White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congress. The proposal created much controversy but received strong endorsement from Alvin Trivelpiece, who was chief of DOE's Office of Science, and William Flynn Martin, the Deputy Secretary of Energy. It was included in President Ronald Reagan's fiscal year 1987 budget submission to the Congress and was approved subsequently by both the House of Representatives and the Senate, the latter with the essential endorsement of Senator Pete Domenici (R, NM). During the spring of 1987, shortly before leaving the DOE, DeLisi established an ethical studies component of the Project. The goal was to reserve 3-5% of the funding for scholars of the humanities and social sciences to develop a system of ethics that would inform decisions about the development and deployment of the radically new technologies destined to emerge from the