Dr. Shendure’s research group is broadly interested in developing new experimental methods and computational tools for the parallelized interrogation of biological systems. In 2009, with collaborators at UW, his group was the first to demonstrate that the massively parallel sequencing of the 1% of the human genome that is protein coding, also known as the “exome”, could be used to cost-effectively identify genetic mutations causing human disease. As an M.D., Ph.D. student in Dr. George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Shendure helped develop polony sequencing, one of the first examples of “next generation DNA sequencing” methods that are now bringing the cost of human genome sequencing close to $1,000. Dr. Shendure conducted his undergraduate studies at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. and M.D. from Harvard Medical School.