David Botstein

David Botstein (born 1942 in Switzerland) is an American biologist who has been the director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University since 2003.

He graduated from Harvard in 1963 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967. He then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became a Professor of Genetics. In 1990, he became Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. He has also worked for Genentech, as the Vice President - Science. Dr. Botstein was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1981 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1993.

Professor Botstein is known for his commitment to education. He is the director of the Integrated Science Program at Princeton University. Many of his students have gone on to be very successful in the field of molecular biology.

In 1980, David Botstein and his colleagues Ray White, Mark Scolnick, and Ron Davis proposed a method for mapping genes that was used in subsequent years to identify several human disease genes including Huntington's and BRCA1. Variations of this method were used in the mapping efforts that predated and enabled the sequencing phase of the Human Genome Project.

In 1998, David Botstein and his postdoctoral fellow Michael Eisen, together with graduate student Paul Spellman and colleague Patrick Brown, developed a statistical method and graphical interface that is widely used to interpret genomic data including microarray data.

Dr. Botstein has won the Eli Lilly and Company Award in Microbiology (1978), the Genetics Society of America Medal (1988), the Allen Award of the American Society of Human Genetics (1989) and the Gruber Prize in Genetics (2003).

He is the brother of Leon Botstein.