Edward Rubin is the chief scientific officer at

Metabiota Metabiota is a San Francisco startup that compiles data from around the world to predict disease outbreaks. The company is a partner with USAID's PREDICT (USAID), PREDICT and PREVENT programs. In the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, Metab ...

, a company that works on epidemic risk and infectious diseases. From 2002 to 2016, he was a researcher at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

and the director of the

Department of Energy A Ministry of Energy or Department of Energy is a government department in some countries that typically oversees the production of fuel and electricity; in the United States, however, it manages nuclear weapons development and conducts energy-rel ...

Joint Genome Institute The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), first located in Walnut Creek then Berkeley, California, was created in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping, DNA sequencing, technology development, and i ...

. In 2012, he was named the Charles J. and Lois B. Epstein Visiting Professor at the University of California San Francisco. Rubin performed testing on the

Neanderthal Neanderthals (, also ''Homo neanderthalensis'' and erroneously ''Homo sapiens neanderthalensis''), also written as Neandertals, are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago. While th ...

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

, which suggests

human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...

and Neanderthal DNA are some 99.5 percent to nearly 99.9 percent identical. He is on the board of directors of the Global Virome Project.

References

Living people Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences American geneticists American medical researchers Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-academic-scientist-stub