Francis S. Collins

Francis S. Collins is an American physician-geneticist who served as the 16th Director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021, spanning three presidential administrations. He currently serves as an NIH Distinguished Investigator leading a research laboratory at the National Human Genome Research Institute. He is best known for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which completed a finished sequence of human DNA in 2003. He announced his retirement from government service in early 2025 after 32 years at NIH.