Len A. Pennacchio
Len Pennacchio heads JGI's Genetic Analysis Program and the Genomic Technologies Program. Len was raised in the North Bay and earned his Bachelor’s degree in biology from Sonoma State University. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the Department of Genetics at Stanford University. During his graduate studies, he worked with Richard Myers to uncover the genetic cause of a rare form of human epilepsy and subsequently generated one of the first mouse models for epilepsy. In 1999, he joined Edward Rubin's laboratory as an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he identified a novel apolipoprotein involved in human and mouse triglyceride metabolism. In 2003, Len became the Head of the Genetic Analysis Program at the DOE Joint Genome Institute and a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2007, he took charge of the Genomic Technologies Program. Len is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists anad Engineers. His research is focused on understanding how DNA sequence variation contributes to phenotypic (trait) differences within a species. For instance, in species such as the poplar tree, what sequence changes explain differences in plant biomass? Or in animals such as human, which DNA variants explain differences in cancer or other disease susceptibilities? This is accomplished through genetic and genomic approaches focused on the identification of both common and rare polymorphisms within a species' genome, followed by their correlation with a trait of interest.
Duties of the Genetic Analysis Program Lead
