Last updated: 7 September 2015. About BGI BGI was founded in Beijing on September 9th, 1999, with a mission of advancing science and technology, building strong research teams, and promoting scientific partnerships in genomics. In 2007, BGI's headquarters was relocated to Shenzhen, while it became the first citizen-managed, non-profit research institution in China.

Striving for excellence, high efficiency, and accuracy, BGI has completed numerous significant projects. These include contributing 1% of the Human Genome Project's reference genome and 10% to the Human HapMap Project; rapidly sequencing and combating the SARS virus and E. coli O104:H4 bacterium; completely sequencing the rice genome, the silkworm genome, the first Asian diploid genome, and the potato genome; and many more. While conducting these projects, BGI has developed world-class technical platforms for large-scale genome sequencing, efficient bioinformatic analysis, and genetic health care innovation.

About the Cognitive Genomics Lab

BGI created the Cognitive Genomics Lab in 2011 with the goal of investigating the genetics of human cognition. Current projects include prosopagnosia ("face blindness") and general intelligence.

Core team

Laurent Tellier is Director of the Cognitive Genomics Lab, a visiting scholar at BGI from the University of Copenhagen Bioinformatics Centre, and entrepreneur founder of an informatics startup in Denmark. Laurent is coordinating local operations in East Asia for the GWAS and prosopagnosia projects, and collaborations with Kings College London and Harvard Vision Lab, dividing his time between Shenzhen, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, and the Tianhe supercomputer. He is a fan of the works of Paolo Bacigalupi, Robert E. Howard, and Andrew Niccol.

Chris Chang is a staff software engineer at Complete Genomics and lead developer of plink2, and was a visiting scholar at BGI-Shenzhen and BGI-Hong Kong for three years. A veteran of numerous math and programming contests, he has the dubious distinction of having been the lowest scorer on the worst-placing US International Mathematical Olympiad team in history. He received his BS and PhD in Mathematics from Caltech and UCSD, respectively.

Stephen Hsu is Vice-President for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon. Hsu was founder and CEO of SafeWeb, a Silicon Valley technology startup acquired by Symantec for $26 million.

James Lee is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He received his PhD in Psychology from Harvard University and worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the National Institutes of Health. His current research interests include statistical genetics, population genetics, psychometrics, and attention and performance. In the picture you can see the result of his first collaborative genetic experiment with his wife.

Collaborators and Advisors

Carson Chow is a Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at the National Institutes of Health. Chow holds a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. His interests are in mathematical and systems biology including neuroscience, obesity, and gene regulation.

Brad Duchaine is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Brad was a faculty member at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London from 2005-2010, following a postdoc in Harvard's Vision Lab and a PhD at UC-Santa Barbara. Brad's main interest is social perception, and much of his work has involved developmental and acquired prosopagnosia.

Ken Nakayama is the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. The Vision Sciences Society recognized his seminal research on all aspects of vision by electing him to serve as its first president. A mild prosopagnosic himself, he is currently studying deficits in face recognition.

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine's "The World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals" and in Time magazine's "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today." His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association.