Dr. Jef Boeke is the founding director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is known for his pioneering work that showed transposable elements can move via an RNA intermediate, and he coined the term 'retrotransposon'. Boeke leads an international team of collaborators to construct a synthetic version of the entire yeast genome. He is one of the co-founders of Genome Project-Write aiming at the synthesis of the human genome and he leads the 'Dark Matter Project' to elucidate the function of non-coding DNA. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.