David Conrad Page

Dr. David Conrad Page is Director of the Whitehead Institute, Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Page’s research focuses on the genetic and developmental foundations of human reproduction, including genetics differences between males and females. The two broad goals of his laboratory are: (1) to understand sex chromosome biology and evolution through comparative genomic sequencing in nine vertebrates and (2) to elucidate the early development of eggs and sperm. Page was able to reconstructed the evolution of today's X and Y chromosomes from an ancestral pair of chromosomes that existed 300 million years ago and discovered molecular evolutionary mechanisms by which the Y chromosome becomes functionally specialized in spermatogenesis. Page also discovered and characterized the most common genetic cause of spermatogenic failure in humans: deletion of the AZFc region of the Y chromosome. He most recently found that aberrant crossing over within the Y chromosome's palindromes underlies a wide range of disorders of sexual differentiation, including Turner syndrome. Page has received numerous awards for his work including a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Science magazine's Top 10 Scientific Advances of the Year (1992, 2003), the Francis Amory Prize, the Curt Stern Award and the 2011 March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and the Institute of Medicine as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.