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My Take
What grabs me about Lander is the audacity of the pivot: a pure mathematician who walked away from abstraction to help decode the human genome. That kind of intellectual restlessness is rare, and it pays off only when paired with the rigor he clearly carries from his Oxford and Stuyvesant roots. The shelf of honors, from the Breakthrough Prize to a MacArthur, almost undersells him; what I admire most is that he stayed a teacher through it all. I read him as proof that the most interesting scientists refuse to stay in one lane, and the boundaries they cross become their real legacy.
Overview
Eric Steven Lander (born February 3, 1957) is an American mathematician and geneticist who is a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Lander received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Eric Lander
- Name (Japanese)
- エリック・ランダー
- Reading
- えりっく・らんだー
- Born
- February 3, 1957 (age 69)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Aquarius / Rooster
- Origin
- Brooklyn, New York, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- mathematician / biotechnologist / economist / epidemiologist / university teacher
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Stuyvesant High School
- University
- University of Oxford
Awards & achievements
- 2013 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences
- MacArthur Fellows Program
- 2012 Harvey Prize
- 2002 Canada Gairdner International Award
- 2010 Albany Medical Center Prize
- 1997 Dickson Prize in Medicine
- 2001 Max Delbrück Medal
- 2004 Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Mathematician — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.