Jef D. Boeke, PhD, DSc, founded and directs the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Health. From 1985–2013, Dr. Boeke was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Boeke received a BS in biochemistry summa cum laude in 1976 from Bowdoin College, and then earned a PhD in molecular biology from Rockefeller University in 1982, where he worked with Peter Model and Norton Zinder on the genetics of the filamentous phage. He did his postdoctoral work at The Whitehead Institute of MIT as a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow with Gerald Fink.

Dr. Boeke discovered a major form of mobile DNA, based on reverse transcription of RNA. He coined the term “retrotransposition” to describe this process, common to virtually all eukaryotic genomes and now studied by a worldwide scientific community. His systems-level studies helped elucidate intricate molecular mechanisms involved in retrotransposition in yeasts, mice and humans.

In the area of synthetic biology, Dr. Boeke leads the international team synthesizing an engineered version of the yeast genome, Sc2.0, the first synthetic eukaryotic genome. In 2018, he launched the “Dark Matter Project” designed to better understand the “instruction manuals” that specify how human genes are expressed, using big DNA technology.