Bob Handsaker was awarded the Broad Institute Award for Science and Engineering at the Broad Institute 10th Annual Retreat. The citation for the award acknowledged his international leadership in the analysis of human genome structural variation.

“Bob has led research in the structural variation field by combining incisive genetic analysis with clever software engineering,” said Steve McCarroll. “Not only does Bob have great ideas for algorithms, he is able to implement his ideas in ways that scale to the enormous data sets that are generated by whole-genome sequencing in large cohorts. The speed of his software solutions allows him to perform novel analyses, critically evaluate the data, and iterate faster than anyone in the field – this and his careful, structured thinking have been key aspects of his leadership.”

Before entering genomics research, Bob, who trained as a computer scientist, had leadership roles in information technology in industry. In his five years in the McCarroll laboratory, Bob has been a lead or co-lead author of three Nature Genetics papers and a major contributing author of papers published in Cell and Nature.

Bob is currently applying his scientific and engineering innovations to prepare the lab and the Broad Institute to analyze genome structural variation in tens of thousands of genomes currently being sequenced in active projects over the coming two years.