Bruce Roe
George Lynn Cross Research Professor
Chemistry/Biochemistry

You might have high expectations walking into the office of a scientist that was part of the famed Human Genome Project. Visions of people whirring around in white lab coats, spouting hypotheses perhaps. But walk into Dr. Bruce Roe's office and he'll more likely be chatting with students in a polo and pair of khaki's.

Don't let appearances fool you however. Roe still has accomplished quite a bit. His lab is a National Institutes of Health-designated center, aimed at determining the complete sequence of the three billion base paired human chromosomes. They have trained masters and doctoral scientists working on the project all over the world as well as created new robotics and computer-based analysis methods. Roe first got involved in the project during his first sabbatical.

"I was studying how proteins get made in cells and (Dr. Frederick) Sanger at the medical research council in Cambridge , England was looking for someone with my expertise to join his group for sabbatical," Roe says. "I applied and was accepted and there helped develop the methods that are used to sequence DNA."

Since then, Roe returned to the United States and has continued to train researchers in the technology. The Human Genome Project began in 1990 and was expected to take approximately 15 years, but due to advances in technology, it was completed in 1993. The central goal of HGP was to identify the 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA, and organize all the data that scientists collected.

Now the George Lynn Cross Research professor's office is located in the new Stephenson Research and Technology Center , a $27 million facility housing programs in biosciences and bioengineering that provides students and faculty with 94,600 square feet of laboratory and office space.

"The department has continued to be extremely strong," Roe says. "When people have retired, we've hired young professors who are absolutely outstanding and can attract research grants and are good teachers and good at research. The university itself has really grown."