Eric S. Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, will step down from his leadership role and will take an unpaid, academic leave-of-absence from his faculty positions to be the first life scientist to serve as White House Science Advisor to President Joseph R. Biden following the inauguration.
“We are pleased and honored that the president-elect has selected Eric to serve at a time when the country desperately needs to reimagine and reenergize science throughout our nation,” said Louis V. Gerstner Jr., chair of the Broad Institute Board of Directors. “We look forward to his return to the Broad Institute in the future.”
Todd R. Golub has been appointed the new director of the Broad Institute by the Board of Directors. As one of the founders of the Institute, Golub played a central role in building and leading the Institute since before its launch in 2004. He is a core Institute member and serves on its executive leadership team. Golub is also the Charles A. Dana Investigator in Human Cancer Genetics at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.
“Broad is in a stronger scientific and cultural position today than at any point in our 16-year history,” Golub said. “Moreover, the pandemic has pushed us to think differently about nearly every aspect of how we collaborate and deliver on our scientific mission. We are well-positioned to work with the larger scientific community to confront some of the most urgent challenges in biomedicine, from developing novel diagnostics and therapeutics for infectious diseases and cancer, to understanding the genetic basis of cardiovascular disease and mental illness. I am honored to serve as director of this remarkable institution.”
Golub joined the Dana-Farber and Harvard faculty in 1997, and served as a key scientific leader of the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, the precursor organization of the Broad Institute. He has also been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and has served as chair of numerous scientific advisory boards, including St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the National Cancer Institute’s Board of Scientific Advisors.