Edward M. "Eddy" Rubin is an internationally known geneticist and medical researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California and has served as the director of the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute since 2002. In addition to his research, Rubin has trained more than 50 scientists who have moved on from his laboratory to serve as faculty at leading institutions. He is on the editorial boards of several journals and scientific advisory boards, including the Board of Reviewing Editors for the journal Science, and has played key roles in directing genomic research at the DOE and the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Rubin oversaw the DOE JGI's involvement in the Human Genome Project, during which time the DOE JGI worked on chromosomes 5, 13 and 16. After that project, he reoriented the DOE JGI toward applying genomics to studies related to bioenergy and the environment, sequencing and analyzing the genetic codes of hundreds of plants, fungi and microbes.
Rubin's early scientific work centered on the functional exploration of the human genome, harnessing sequence comparisons between species for the discovery of genes and non-coding sequences of pivotal evolutionary and biomedical importance. Among his projects is work involving sequencing DNA from Neanderthal bones, though he was not involved in the May 2010 publication of a draft Neanderthal genome. Rubin has published more than 200 peer-reviewed publications, primarily focused on the development of methods to study genomes. More recently, he has been on the forefront of the new science of metagenomics, deriving important insights from his investigations of microbial communities inhabiting environments ranging from gutless ocean-dwelling worms to cow rumen that might be useful for commercial biofuel production, cleaning up contaminated sites, and other applications.