Dr. Robert Waterston is a graduate of Princeton University and received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. One of the first graduate students of Sydney Brenner in Cambridge, he set up an independent laboratory that helped to establish the nematode worm c. elegans as a powerful experimental organism. Following a second visit to Cambridge to work with John Sulston in 1985, his work increasingly concentrated on genomic mapping and sequencing. Building on his experience, he led one of the teams that published the working draft of the human genome in 2001.

Dr. Waterston has been at Washington University, St. Louis since 1976 and is currently Chairman of the Department of Genetics and Director of the Washington University Genome Sequencing Center. He has had close scientific collaborations with many prominent genome researchers on both sides of the Atlantic and had a pivotal role in the completion of the first rough draft of the human genome in 1990.