Huntington Faxon Willard (born c.1953) is an American
geneticist. In 2014, he was named to head the
Marine Biological Laboratory, and is a professor in human genetics at the
University of Chicago. He stepped down from leading the lab in 2017 to return to research. Willard was elected to the
National Academy of Medicine in 2016. Earlier, beginning in 2003 he was the Nanaline H. Duke Professor of Genome Sciences, the first director of the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and Vice Chancellor for Genome Sciences at
Duke University Medical Center in
Durham, North Carolina
Durham ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Durham County, North Carolina, Durham County. Small portions of the city limits extend into Orange County, North Carolina, Orange County and Wake County, North Carol ...
.
Willard graduated from the Belmont Hill School in
Belmont, Massachusetts
Belmont is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. It is a western suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, United States; and is part of the Greater Boston metropolitan area. At the time of the 2020 U.S. Census, the town's population stood at 27,295 ...
in 1971. He received his A.B. degree in
biology from
Harvard University in 1975 and his Ph.D. from
Yale University in 1979. He did a postdoctoral fellowship in medical genetics at
Johns Hopkins University from 1979-81.
He then held positions at the
University of Toronto from 1982 to 1989,
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
from 1989 to 1992, and was Chairman of the Department of Genetics at
Case Western Reserve University
Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio. Case Western Reserve was established in 1967, when Western Reserve University, founded in 1826 and named for its location in the Connecticut Western Reser ...
from 1992 to 2002.
His current research interests include
genome sciences and their broad implications for medicine and society, human
chromosome structure and function,
X-inactivation and mechanisms of
gene silencing, and the first reported development of
human artificial chromosomes for studies of
gene transfer and functional genomics. Studies of the X-chromosome in his laboratory by
Carolyn J. Brown
Carolyn J. Brown (born in 1961, Ontario) is a Canadian geneticist and Professor in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia. Brown is known for her studies on X-chromosome inactivation, having discovered the human ...
led to the discovery of the human
XIST gene, the
long noncoding RNA associated with the
inactive X chromosome.
References
External links
Personal site at Duke UniversityCurriculum Vitae and Bibliography of Huntington F. Willard
{{DEFAULTSORT:Willard, Huntington
Living people
21st-century American biologists
American geneticists
Duke University faculty
Harvard College alumni
Yale University alumni
1950s births
University of Chicago faculty
Members of the National Academy of Medicine