History

CEHG was founded in the Autumn of 2012 by the School of Humanities and Sciences and the School of Medicine, with founding Co-Directors Carlos Bustamante and Marcus Feldman, who were joined on the founding committee by Profs. Hank Greely, Dmitri Petrov, Noah Rosenberg, and Chiara Sabatti. In 2013, CEHG hosted the first annual symposium, and the center welcomed its first cohort of fellows, graduate students and postdocs representing 7 CEHG member labs. Stanford graduate Cody Sam served as staff Director of Programs from 2013-2017 and Katie Kanagawa served as Communications and Program Manager 2014-2019, helping to launch CEHG as a vibrant community for research and interdisciplinary interaction and training. Prof. Jonathan Pritchard joined Prof. Marcus Feldman as Co-Director in 2017, with Prof. Noah Rosenberg becoming the third co-director in 2023.

With the help of Acting Program Manager Larry Bond during the pandemic, CEHG launched major programs such as a close look at the history of eugenics at Stanford in a multidisciplinary seminar series in 2020-2021, and a 2021 seminar series and 2022 special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences investigating the perspective on human genetic similarity described by the late Richard Lewontin in his seminal 1972 article "The apportionment of human diversity." The revolution linking genomics, computation, and statistics was well underway in 2012 when CEHG took shape, and with advances such as the growth of machine learning, the crystallization of data science as an academic subfield, and the central role of mathematical evolutionary modeling of SARS-CoV-2 during the COVID-19 pandemic, the quantitative sciences and genomic sciences are now even more tightly intertwined.

The flagship CEHG fellows program has now supported over 100 trainees across more than 25 labs. Many of the fellows have advanced to leading positions at the intersection of genomics and computational biology, both in academia and industry. In 2022, we were pleased to welcome 9 of our fellows back to Stanford in-person and virtually as speakers in a special Evolgenome seminar series celebrating the 10th anniversary of CEHG - covering topics ranging from evolution of cancer to gut microbiomes to bat viruses. We look forward to an exciting second decade of CEHG activities.

CEHG Co-Directors

2012-2016 Carlos Bustamante & Marcus Feldman

2017-2023 Marcus Feldman & Jonathan Pritchard

2023- Marcus Feldman, Jonathan Pritchard & Noah Rosenberg