George Church

As a child in Florida, Church taught himself electronics and built a functional home‑brew computer because personal computers were not available; he also learned early programming languages at Phillips Academy later in adolescence.

Church was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he thrived academically, gained access to computing resources, and learned programming languages such as BASIC, LISP, and FORTRAN—skills he later integrated with biology.

Church completed bachelor’s degrees in zoology and chemistry at Duke University in two years while undertaking laboratory research and publishing early papers.

While doing graduate research at Duke, Church’s unconventional approach and noncompliance with certain graduate policies led to his withdrawal from Duke’s graduate program; despite the setback, he had already published multiple papers from the work.

Admitted to Harvard’s doctoral program under Walter Gilbert, Church worked on sequencing approaches (including early ideas of multiplexed sequencing/polony methods) as part of his dissertation and completed a PhD in 1984.

After completing his PhD, Church spent six months at Biogen and then took a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF with Gail Martin, expanding his skills into mammalian biology and stem cells.