Michael Eisen

Michael Eisen is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an Associate Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

He received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard College in 1989. He was a graduate student with Don Wiley at Harvard University, where he studied the structure and evolution of influenza virus proteins.

After a summer stint as a radio broadcaster for the Columbia Mules, a minor league baseball team in Tennessee, he joined the laboratories of Patrick O. Brown and David Botstein at Stanford Medical School as a postdoctoral fellow. While in the Brown-Botstein labs Eisen contributed to the transformation of the DNA microarray from a technical novelty into an essential tool for biomedical research.

His 1998 paper on clustering DNA microarray data has been cited over 5,000 times. In 2000 he started his own lab at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley, studying the evolution of gene regulation. He was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2001 and received a Presidential Early Career Award in Sciences and Engineering in 2004.

In addition to his research, Eisen has been a staunch advocate for
"open access" publishing. In 2000, along with Pat Brown and Nobel
Prize winning cancer biologist Harold Varmus, he founded the Public
Library of Science - a not for profit scientific publisher dedicated
to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely
available public resource. He continues to serve on the PLoS Board,
and is actively engaged in developing new ways to disseminate and use
scientific knowledge.