Biographical Outline: Richard P. Woychik, PH.D.
| Date: June 2002 | 
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Dr. Richard Woychik is a world-renowned geneticist whose distinguished career includes contributions in both academia and industry. A native of a small town in Northeastern Wisconsin, Dr. Woychik completed his undergraduate and Master's degrees at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, in 1984. He then spent three years of postdoctoral training with Dr. Philip Leder at Harvard Medical. During this time he was involved in identifying and cloning the gene associated with a mutation in the mouse, called limb deformity (ld), that causes deformities in the fore- and hindlimbs of the animals. At this point in his career he also started his formal connections with the Jackson Laboratory. One of the first alleles of ld, which was identified at the Jackson Laboratory, was provided to him by the staff at the Jackson Laboratory for his experiments and proved to be extremely useful for ultimately making progress in identifying the ld gene.
Following his postdoctoral appointment, in 1987 Dr. Woychik joined the staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. During his 10 years at ORNL, he moved up the ranks to become a Senior Research Scientist in the Life Sciences Division, Mammalian Genetics Section. In 1995 he followed Dr. Liane Russell as the Head of the Mammalian Genetics Section, and in 1996 assumed the role of Director of the Office of Functional Genomics, where he reported directly to Head of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. During this period he was also an adjunct Professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In August 1997 he moved his laboratory to Cleveland, Ohio, and started a new position as Vice Chairman for Research in the Department of Pediatrics, and Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, Genetics and Pharmacology at Case Western Reserve University. In his role as Vice Chairman for Research, he reported directly to the Chairman of the department and functioned as the director of all research activities in the Department of Pediatrics.
Dr. Woychik brought his skills as both scientist and administrator to the pharmaceutical industry in 1998 when he was recruited to the San Francisco Bay area to become the Head of the Parke-Davis Laboratory for Molecular Genetics. In this role he reported directly to the Vice President of Discovery Research at Parke-Davis and provided the leadership for what was originally the only research center within the company located on the West coast. After the merger with Pfizer, he continued with the company until January of 2001, at which time he left the pharmaceutical sector to become the Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) at Lynx Therapeutics, a Biotechnology company in the Bay Area focused on a number of inventions by Dr. Sydney Brenner. As the CSO he was responsible for overseeing the scientific activities at the company at both its Hayward, California and Heidelberg, Germany, sites. He developed a management platform to coordinate the scientific activities in the various departments thoughout the company, and also conceived of and implemented a new business model based on systems biology research to help penetrate the market with the new Lynx technologies. He accepted the position of Director of The Jackson Laboratory in 2002, having served on the institution's Board of Scientific Overseers since 1999.
In the scientific world, Dr. Woychik is renowned for his work to positionally clone the agouti gene in 1992, which was particularly notable as the first obesity-related gene. His considerable progress in understanding the function of the agouti gene was aided in large part by access to several alleles of agouti that were provided through a series of highly productive collaborations with investigators at the Jackson Laboratory. His laboratory at Oak Ridge was also involved in a large scale insertional mutagenesis program that provided the tools to generate mouse models and clone the genes associated with many forms of human disease, including polycystic kidney disease and congenital hearing loss. Dr. Woychik is the author of more than 80 published scientific papers and recipient of many awards. He is an active member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology and the Society for Developmental Biology, as well as many national scientific committees. He is married to Janice Woychik and has an 11-year-old son, Alexander.
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