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President Obama announced his intent to nominate Francis S. Collins as Director of the National Institutes of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services. If confirmed by the Senate, Collins will lead NIH's 27 institutes and centers, which together employ 18,000 people, most at the Bethesda campus. The agency has a budget of $31 billion this year, about 80 percent of which is distributed to scientists elsewhere.
Dr. Collins, a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes has more recently been a champion of "personalized medicine," which he hopes to harvest the fruits of the genomics revolution in the form of better and safer clinical care. Collins resigned as director of NIH's genome institute last August and has since finished "The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalized Medicine," a book about the dawning era of personalized medicine, which will be published next year.
With Dr. Collins at the helm, the Human Genome Project consistently met projected milestones ahead of schedule and under budget. This remarkable international project culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. Collins received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, the nation's highest civil award, for his revolutionary contributions to genetic research.
Collins received a BS in Chemistry from the University of Virginia, a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Yale University, and an MD with Honors from the University of North Carolina. Prior to coming to NIH in 1993, he spent nine years on the faculty of the University of Michigan, where he was an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For more information please contact Neil Snyder, ASHA's Director of Federal Advocacy, at 800-498-2071, ext. 5614 or nsnyder@asha.org.
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