Jef Boeke is the Founding Director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is known for work on mechanistic and genomic aspects of retrotransposition, and develops technologies in genetics, genomics and synthetic biology. Born in 1954 in Albany NY, he grew up in New Jersey and received a Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry from Bowdoin College in 1972. Following this he spent a year as a Watson Fellow, collecting plants in the Andes. He obtained a PhD in Molecular Biology from the Rockefeller University in 1982, where he worked on the genetics of filamentous phage assembly with Peter Model and Norton Zinder. He did his postdoctoral work at MIT/Whitehead Institute on yeast/transposon genetics with Gerald Fink. He served on the faculty of the Department of Molecular Biology & Genetics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1986-2014, where he also founded the High Throughput Biology Center.
