Douglas Lee Brutlag

Douglas Lee Brutlag (born December 19, 1946) is an American molecular biologist and Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Medicine at Stanford University. He is recognized as a pioneer in the fields of bioinformatics and computational molecular biology.

Education and early research Brutlag earned a B.S. with honors in Biology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1968, where he published three papers in Dr. James Bonner's laboratory. He was accepted to graduate programs at Harvard, Berkeley, and Stanford, ultimately choosing Stanford University for his Ph.D. in Biochemistry, which he received with "Great Distinction" in 1972.

Career From 1972 to 1974, Brutlag completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia under the mentorship of Dr. Jim Peacock, a prominent molecular biologist and head of the Australian Scientific Society. There, he developed cloning methods for eukaryotic DNA in bacteria and characterized a significant portion of heterochromatic DNA sequences in Drosophila, ultimately sequencing around 20% of its genome.

In 1993, Brutlag was a founding member of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) and helped organize the first Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) symposium held at Stanford.

Academic service and teaching He served on numerous committees at Stanford University and Stanford Medical School. He also contributed to early digitization initiatives with the Stanford Libraries and collaborated with Google and others to digitize public-domain materials.

Honors and appointments Brutlag has received numerous academic honors and held several prestigious advisory roles throughout his career, including the following: and a son Benjamin Brutlag who married Samantha Brutlag also known as Samantha Hill.