Robert Waterston

Robert Hugh Waterston is an American biologist born September 17, 1943, in Detroit, Michigan, who moved to the University of Washington in 2003 as the William Gates III Endowed Chair and chaired its genome sciences department until 2018. Working alongside John Sulston, he led sequencing of the genome of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, completed in December 1998 as the first full genome sequence of a multicellular organism, and was a major contributor to the Human Genome Project as well as later mouse and chimpanzee genome sequencing efforts. He also helped establish the Bermuda Principles of 1996, which committed genome sequencing centers to releasing data publicly and rapidly. He received the Gairdner Award in 2002, the Dan David Prize in 2002, and the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2005.