Chen Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research

2012      John Mattick
Garvan Institute of Medical Research

John Mattick is the Director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney. He undertook his undergraduate training at the University of Sydney and his PhD at Monash University in Melbourne. He subsequently worked at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, the CSIRO Division of Molecular Biology in Sydney and, until recently, the University of Queensland in Brisbane, where he was the Foundation Director of the Australian Genome Research Facility and the Institute for Molecular Bioscience. He has also spent sabbatical periods at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Cologne and Strasbourg.

Professor Mattick's has broad experience in microbial and animal molecular biology and genomics. His primary research focus is the role of regulatory RNA in human development and cognition. His honours and awards include the Biotechnology Medal of the Australian Biochemical Society, Honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, the Order of Australia, the inaugural Gutenberg Professorship of the University of Strasbourg, the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Medal, Membership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, and Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science.

Chen New Investigator Award

2012      Charles Lee
Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School

Charles Lee, Ph.D. is the Director of the Molecular Genetic Research Unit, an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, and a Board-certified Clinical Cytogeneticist at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Dr. Lee is also cross-appointed as an Associate Member of the Broad Institute and holds an honorary Professorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a past chair of the American Society of Human Genetics Program Committee and a former Associate Editor of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Dr. Lee received his doctoral degree from the University of Alberta, Canada in 1996 and was subsequently an NSERC research fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK from 1996-1998. He then completed his Clinical Cytogenetic fellowship at Harvard Medical School, USA from 1998-2001, and became board certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics in 2002. Dr. Lee has authored over 125 publications and serves on the advisory board of several scientific and policy committees including the steering committee of the International 1000 Genomes Project, the International Standard Cytogenomic Array (ISCA) Consortium, the Cancer Cytogenomics Microarray Consortium (CCMC), the NIH-sponsored prenatal microarray study and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He is also a regular grant reviewer for the Genes, Health and Development Study Section at the National Institutes of Health.

Some recent honors that Dr. Lee has received include a scientific Team Award from the American Association for Cancer Research (2007), the C. Thomas Caskey lectureship from the University of South Carolina (2008), the Ho-Am Prize in Medicine (2008), the George Brumley Jr. Memorial Award from Duke University (2010), and the Vandenberge Visiting Chair from the Center for Human Genetics - Katholic University of Leuven in Belgium (2012).

The research in Dr. Lee's laboratory has been centered on the use of state-of-the-art molecular technologies to study the structure and evolution of vertebrate genomes with a focus on understanding the role of structural genomic variation in human phenotypes and disease susceptibility.