Harris A. Lewin, an American biologist, is a professor of evolution and ecology and Robert and Rosabel Osborne Endowed Chair at the
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...
. He is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
. In 2011, Lewin won the
Wolf Prize in Agriculture
The Wolf Prize in Agriculture is awarded annually by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics and the Arts. The ...
for his research into cattle genomics. Lewin chairs the working group for the Earth BioGenome Project, a moonshot for biology that aims to sequence, catalog, and characterize the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity over a period of 10 years.
Lewin is a founding co-
editor
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, photographic, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, orga ...
of the ''
Annual Review of Animal Biosciences
The ''Annual Review of Animal Biosciences'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Annual Reviews. It releases an annual volume of review articles relevant to the fields of zoology, veterinary medicine, animal husbandry, and conserv ...
'', first published in 2013.
Career
Lewin studied at
Cornell University
Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...
and earned his B.S. in Animal Science in 1979 and M.S. in Animal Breeding and Genetics in 1981. He was awarded his Ph.D. in Immunology from the
University of California, Davis
The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The institut ...
in 1984. He then worked at the
University of Illinois
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...
. In 2003, he served as the founding director of the
Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology
The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) is ainterdisciplinaryfacility for genomics research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Institute was built in 2006 to centralize biotechnology research at the University o ...
. In 2009, he and a team of researchers fully sequenced the cow
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 ...
.
Lewin served as vice chancellor for research at University of California, Davis from 2011 until 2016. In 2016 he returned to the faculty in the University of California, Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and the Genome Center. Lewin is a member of a group biologists that propose to sequence the DNA of all life on Earth.
Lewin was senior author of a study that revealed one of the most prolific bulls in the history of Holstein cattle breeding, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, had a lethal gene mutation estimated to have caused half million spontaneous cow abortions worldwide. Lewin collaborated with researchers from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in France for a study that used RNA-sequencing to highlight problems with gene expression in cloned cattle. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lewin and his colleagues used an algorithm to computationally recreate the chromosomes of the first eutherian mammal, the long-extinct, shrewlike ancestor of all placental mammals.
At the 48th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, Lewin announced a landmark partnership between the
Earth BioGenome Project
The Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) is an initiative that aims to sequence and catalog the genomes of all of Earth's currently described eukaryotic species over a period of ten years. The initiative would produce an open DNA database of biological i ...
and the Earth Bank of Codes to map the DNA of all the planet’s eukaryotes, some 1.5 million known species. Lewin was the lead author for a perspective paper published April 23, 2018 in the ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', "Earth BioGenome Project: Sequencing life for the future of life." In the paper, the 24 interdisciplinary experts who comprise the Earth BioGenome Project Working Group, outline a roadmap and rational for the project, which is estimated to cost $4.7 billion and take ten years.