By BBI Communications
BBI Scientific Director Dr. Jay Shendure will honored October 13 by UW Medicine as the 2022 “Inventor of the Year.”
The event will be 5 pm to 7:30 pm at the UW Medicine office, 850 Republican Street, in Seattle. It will also include the CoMotion Innovator Showcase, where the next generation of UW innovators will share biomedical research. For more information, email somevent@uw.edu.
Each year, the award’s selection committee solicits nominations from department chairs and administrators. Nominations are evaluated based on these criteria:
- Number of lives saved or improved.
- Biomedical impact of the invention.
- Contribution to the bioscience sector.
- Contributions to the UW CoMotion mission to extend the impact of the University of Washington research through the creation of partnerships that encourage investment in innovation.
- Contributions to the UW School of Medicine faculty community.
Past award recipients, who also are BBI members, include: Drs. David Baker, Irwin Bernstein, Michael Cunningham, Alex Greninger, Bruce Montgomery, and Bonnie Ramsey.
In announcing the 2022 award, UW Medicine noted that Shendure’s research group “pioneered exome sequencing and its earliest applications to gene discovery for Mendelian disorders and autism; cell-free DNA diagnostics for cancer and reproductive medicine; massively parallel reporter assays, saturation genome editing; whole organism lineage tracing, and massively parallel molecular profiling of single cells.”
“Dr. Shendure has launched multiple successful startups, industry collaborations, and innovative research tools that have been licensed to established companies,” the announcement stated.
Dr. Shelly Sakiyama-Elbert, vice dean of the UW Medicine Office of Research and Graduate Education, commented, “Unquestionably, this award is well-deserved.”
“Jay Shendure personifies innovation in the field of genome science,” she said. “Since arriving at the UW in 2007, he has advanced precision medicine by exploring previously unexamined research methodologies, as well as mentoring young scientists. In addition, the scope of his work extends beyond the Department of Genome Sciences, and includes his leadership roles at the Brotman-Baty Institute for Precision Medicine, the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.”
