Eric Steven Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute (a collaboration between MIT and Harvard) and director of its genome biology program. As one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, Lander is exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying the basis of human disease. He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School, and graduated in 1974, and participated in the Achievement Summit in Salt Lake City as a high school delegate. Lander then attended Princeton, and graduated as valedictorian. He went on to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he wrote his doctorate in symmetric designs. As a mathematician, he studied applications of representation theory to coding theory. Lander enjoyed mathematics but did not wish to spend his life in a "monastic career." Unsure of what to do next, he took a job teaching managerial economics at Harvard Business School; he began to write a book on information theory. As the suggestion of his brother, he started to look at neurobiology. In order to understand mathematical neurobiology, Lander felt he had to study cellular neurobiology; this in turn led to his study of microbiology and he continued down to the level of genetics. Lander then joined the Whitehead Institute in 1986 and later MIT as a geneticist. In 1990, he founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, and, under his leadership, it became one of the world's leading centers of genome research. The institute made important breakthroughs in the study of medical genetics. The Center formed the basis for the creation of the Broad Institute, a transformation in which Lander was instrumental. Lander is one of the driving forces behind today’s revolution in genomics, and the study of all of the genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease. In 2008, he was named with fellow Academy of Achievement member Harold E. Varmus, one of the co-chairs of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Dr. Eric Lander also attended the 1999 Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. and spoke to the student delegates about his journey as a pioneering researcher.