George McDonald Church (born August 28, 1954) is an American geneticist, molecular engineer, chemist, serial entrepreneur, and pioneer in personal genomics and synthetic biology. He is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.
Through his Harvard laboratory, Church has co-founded around 50 biotechnology companies. In 2018, the Church laboratory at Harvard spun off 16 biotechnology companies in one year. The Church laboratory works on research projects that are distributed in diverse areas of modern biology like developmental biology, neurobiology, information processing, medical genetics, aging, genomics, gene therapy, diagnostics, chemistry & bioengineering, space biology & space genetics, and ecosystem. Research and technology developments at the Church laboratory have impacted or made direct contributions to nearly all "next-generation sequencing (NGS)" methods and companies.
In 2017, Time magazine listed him in Time 100, the list of 100 most influential people in the world. In 2022, he was featured among the most influential people in biopharma by Fierce Pharma. As of January 2023, Church serves as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Board of Sponsors.
Church was born on August 28, 1954, on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, and grew up in nearby Clearwater, Florida. He attended high school at the preparatory boarding school Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1968 to 1972. He then attended Duke University, where he obtained a B.S. degree in zoology and chemistry in two years.
In the fall of 1973, Church began research work at Duke University with assistant professor of biochemistry Sung-Hou Kim, work that continued a year later in a graduate biochemistry program at Duke on an National Science Foundation fellowship.
As Peter Miller reported on Church for the National Geographic series, "The Innovators":As a graduate student at Duke ... he used x-ray crystallography to study the three-dimensional structure of "transfer" RNA, which decodes DNA and carries instructions to other parts of the cell. It was groundbreaking research, but Church spent so much time in the lab—up to a hundred hours a week—that he neglected his other classes [in the fall of 1975].
As a result, Church was not compliant with Duke graduate academic policies, and was withdrawn from the degree program in January 1976. He was told that "[We] hope that whatever problems ... contributed to your lack of success ... at Duke will not keep you from a successful pursuit of a productive career." The work gave rise to publications including a PNAS report with Church as lead author on an early model for molecular interactions between the minor groove of double-stranded DNA and β-ribbons of proteins.
Church returned to graduate work at Harvard University in 1977 under Walter Gilbert, and completed a Ph.D in biochemistry and molecular biology working on mobile genetic elements within introns of yeast mitochondrial and mouse immunoglobulin genes (1984).
After completing his doctoral work, Church spent six months of 1984 at Biogen, the industrial laboratory site where Gilbert had relocated a sizable part of his former Harvard group. This was followed soon after by a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco with Gail R. Martin, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and joint-discoverer of a technique to extract mouse embryonic stem cells.
Church joined the Harvard Medical School faculty as an assistant professor in 1986. Church is now the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and a member of the Harvard-MIT health sciences and technology faculty. He was also a founding member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University. He served as the director of the Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS) at the Harvard Medical School, funded by a P50-type award from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), a part of the National Institutes of Health.
He co-founded Veritas Genetics and its European and Latin American subsidiary, Veritas Intercontinental, with the idea of bringing the benefits of genomic data to millions of people globally.
Church was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2012 for contributions to human genome sequencing technologies and DNA synthesis and assembly.
In 2018, Church co-founded Nebula Genomics, a personal genomics company that offers a whole-genome sequencing service. The company says that it is developing its own blockchain, intending to provide free sequencing in exchange for users' genomic and personal data. The decentralized nature of a blockchain also has the potential to improve aspects of data privacy and security, but identification of individuals could still be possible (DNA itself is a unique identifier) and law enforcement could still issue search warrants or subpoena the data.
In 2021, Church joined as a co-founder of HLTH.network (formerly Shivom), a healthcare blockchain startup which created the world's first global genomics data sharing and analytics marketplace. The HLTH.network aims to be the "world's first base layer protocol for global health data." In 2025, Church joined Lila Sciences, an AI agent platform startup, as Chief Scientist.
George Church Institute of Regenesis: collaboration with BGI Group, China
Since 2007, Church has served on the scientific advisory board of BGI Group.
In 2017, BGI established the "George Church Institute of Regenesis", a research collaboration between Church's lab and about a dozen staffers at BGI in China. Dr. Xun Xu, executive director of BGI Group said:
Professor George Church is a legend in this field for his creative achievements in gene editing and genome synthesis. With support of advanced technology platform of China National GeneBank, the collaboration between BGI and Professor Church will bring top resources and talents together to overcome current bottleneck issues and further improve the technology.