Ronald W. Davis

Ronald Wayne Davis is an American biochemist born July 17, 1941, in Charleston, Illinois, who is a professor of biochemistry and genetics at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center. He developed the R-loop electron microscopy technique for mapping coding regions of RNA, work that contributed to the discovery of RNA splicing, was among the first to show that restriction endonucleases could be used to join DNA fragments, helped develop the first DNA microarray for gene expression profiling, and helped develop the restriction fragment length polymorphism method of genetic linkage mapping that enabled the Human Genome Project. He received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1981, the Dickson Prize in Medicine in 2005, the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2011, and the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize in 2013, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983.