Alexander Hoekstra

Alexander Hoekstra is a biotechnology contributor at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and Project Coordinator for the Personal Genome Project (PGP), an open-source initiative to explore the role of genomes and environments on human traits, based at Harvard Medical School. He also works with fellow PGP advisor and coordinator Preston (Pete) Estep at TeloMe, Inc. — a DNA-collection and telomere analysis company cofounded with George Church.
 
Before earning his BSc in Genomics and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University in 2012, he worked as a researcher at Wayne State University School of Medicine — Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics, The National Institutes of Health — NIDDK, and Michigan State University — Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.
 
Alex’s ambition through the Lifeboat Foundation and others like it is to contribute to humanity’s constant exploration of the world and the universe we inhabit (with only slightly less regard for those that we don’t). He means to stand on the shoulders of giants, and to offer his shoulders as platforms for others as we reach ever higher toward understanding (or at least toward better questions).
 
Alex is an active member of the DIYBio movement and proponent of Open Science, orchestrating the Open Science Summit, an annual conference to evolve and extend discussions identifying the issues facing science in its many practices, and exploring ways in which those practices could be made better through openness. He maintains that for science to excel in its potential as a human endeavor for benefit of humanity’s whole, scientists (accredited or not) must embrace and advance a networked infrastructure of collaboration in inquiry, creativity, exploration, and production.
 
Read his LinkedIn profile. Read his blogs Welcome to the Kick-Off and Bioneering ~ In search of Life.