George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, and a serial entrepreneur who is widely regarded as the "Founding Father of Genomics", and a pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Through his Harvard lab Church has co-founded around 50 biotech companies pushing the boundaries of innovation in the world of life sciences and making his lab as the hotbed of biotech startup activity in Boston. In 2018, the Church lab at Harvard made a record by spinning off 16 biotech companies in one year. The Church lab works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, info processing, medical genetics, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church lab have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies. In 2017, Time magazine listed him in Time 100, the list of 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was featured among the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma, and was listed among the top 8 famous geneticists of all time in human history. , Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors, established by Albert Einstein. Education and early life George McDonald Church was born on August 28, 1954, on MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, Florida, and grew up in nearby Clearwater. He attended high school at the preparatory boarding school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1972. He then studied at Duke University, completing a bachelor's degree in zoology and chemistry in two years. In the fall of 1973, Church began research work at Duke University with assistant professor of biochemistry Sung-Hou Kim, work that continued a year later in a graduate biochemistry program at Duke on an NSF fellowship. As Peter Miller reported on Church for the National Geographic series, "The Innovators":As a graduate student at Duke ... he used x-ray crystallography to study the three-dimensional structure of "transfer" RNA, which decodes DNA and carries instructions to other parts of