Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Green comes from a scientific family. His father, Maurice Green, Ph.D., was a virologist at St. Louis University School of Medicine, where he directed the Institute for Molecular Virology for over five decades. His brother, Michael Green, M.D., Ph.D., is a molecular biologist at the University of Massachusetts-Worcester, where he chairs the Department of Molecular, Cell, and Cancer Biology and is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Green received his B.S. degree in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981 and his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington University in 1987. During residency training in clinical pathology, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Maynard Olson, where he launched his career in genomics research.
Career
In 1992, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Pathology and Genetics as well as a co-investigator in the Human Genome Center at Washington University. In 1994, he joined the newly established Intramural Research Program of the National Center for Human Genome Research, later renamed the National Human Genome Research Institute. Green has served as chief of the NHGRI Genome Technology Branch, director of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center, and NHGRI Scientific Director. He was appointed by Francis Collins to be NHGRI Director in 2009.
Genomics research
While directing an independent research program for almost two decades, Green worked to map, sequence and understand eukaryotic genomes. His work included significant involvement in the Human Genome Project. These efforts eventually blossomed into a program in comparative genomics that provided insights about genome structure, function and evolution. His laboratory also identified and characterized several human disease genes, including those implicated in certain forms of hereditary deafness, vascular disease and inherited peripheral neuropathy.
NHGRI Director
As NHGRI director, Dr. Green leads the Institute's research programs and other initiatives. Under his guidance, the Institute has completed two major cycles of strategic planning. The first effort yielded the highly cited 2011 NHGRI strategic plan, “Charting a course for genomic medicine from base pairs to bedside” the second will yield a new strategic plan in October 2020. These two strategic planning processes have guided an expansion of NHGRI’s research portfolio, highlights of which include the design and launch of major new programs to accelerate the application of genomics to medical care, to catalyze the growth of genomic data science, to continue efforts to unravel the functional complexities of the human genome, and to enhance the building of the genomics workforce of the future. Dr. Green has played a leadership role in developing many high-profile efforts relevant to genomics. These efforts include multiple NIH Common Fund Programs – such as the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, Human Heredity and Health in Africa, and the Human Microbiome Project – the Smithsonian-NHGRI exhibition Genome: Unlocking Life's Code, several trans-NIH data science initiatives, the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy, and the U.S. Precision Medicine Initiative and NIH All of Us Research Program.
