George Weinstock
Associate Director
The Genome Center
St. Louis, MO
USA

George Weinstock, Ph.D. joined Washington University in 2008 where he currently serves as Associate Director of The Genome Center and as a Professor of Genetics. Prior to his move to St.Louis, George was associated with Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. While at Baylor he served as Co-Director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center and held the title of Professor of Molecular and Human Genetics from 1998 until his recent transfer. During his tenure at Baylor George was one of the pioneers of the Human Genome Project during the period of rapid expansion of large-scale genome sequencing.

Presently Dr. Weinstock is contributing in the effort to apply next generation sequencing technologies to microbial genomics, drastically reducing costs and expanding the number of organisms under study. Included in this work is studying the human microbiome, the collection of microbes that colonize the human body. The goal of this work is to analyze the genomes of these organisms, characterize the communities that they form, and measure how these change with different health and disease states. In addition to microbial and model organism research, Dr. Weinstock was one of the lead investigators in the sequencing of one of the first individual human genomes, that of Dr. James Watson. Currently he is engaged in other large-scale human sequencing projects, such as the 1000 genome and cancer genome projects, and is leading efforts in human disease mutation discovery. As with all of his projects, the ultimate goal is to use large DNA sequence data sets to connect genotype to phenotype. He has served on many review committees, site visit committees, and advisory panels, both national and international, and has taught a number of genetics and microbiology courses, both at his home institution and internationally.

Dr. George Weinstock, Ph.D. received a B.S. degree from the Univ. Michigan (Biophysics, 1970), a Ph.D. from MIT (Microbiology, 1977) and did his postdoctoral research at Stanford Univ. Medical School (Biochemistry Department). In 1980, he joined the NCI-Frederick Cancer Research Facility and established the DNA Metabolism Section, Laboratory of Recombinant DNA. In 1984, he moved to The Univ. Texas-Houston Health Science Center (Dept. Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 1984-95; Dept. Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, 1995-2001). Dr. Weinstock’s research interests have focused on using genome analysis to connect genotype to phenotype and uncover fundamental biological principles. He has applied high-throughput DNA sequencing, genome-wide analysis, bioinformatics, and other genetic methods to the study of microbes, particularly pathogens, as well as the human and model organism genomes. He was a leader in a number of genome projects including the human, rat, mouse, cow, macaque, marmoset, orangutan, dolphin, wallaby, sea urchin, honey bee, beetle, wasp, acorn worm, Drosophila melanogaster and pseudoobscura, Dictyostelium discoideum, Ascosphaera apis, and Acanthamoeba among others. He has directed the sequencing of over 100 bacterial genomes of interest in infectious diseases and evolutionary studies, starting with Treponema pallidum (syphilis) which was published in 1998.

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