Leonid Kruglyak

Leonid Kruglyak, Ph.D., is Chair of the Department of Human Genetics and Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biological Chemistry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA , where he holds the Diller-von Furstenberg Endowed Chair in Human Genetics. He also serves as Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research interests focus on understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes.

Kruglyak is a recipient of many awards, including a James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Genetics, a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, the Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics, and the Edward Novitski Prize from the Genetics Society of America. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science “for distinguished contributions to the study of variation in the human genome and for pioneering genetic studies of gene expression variation.” He has served in a number of editorial roles, including the boards of reviewing editors at Science Magazine and at eLife, and is a founding advisory board member of bioRxiv. 

Kruglyak received his AB degree in physics from Princeton University, and as a Hertz Fellow, his MS and PhD degrees, also in physics, from the University of California at Berkeley. After postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and at Oxford University, Kruglyak joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research as a research scientist. Subsequently, he held faculty positions at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, the University of Washington, and Princeton University.