Tim Sackton
Tim is the Director of Bioinformatics for the FAS Informatics Group, a position he has held since 2017. In this role, he oversees the operations of the Bioinformatics Core, working to facilitate bioinformatics research at Harvard.
Tim did his undergraduate studies at Brown University, where he was immediately captivated by David Rand's Evolutionary Biology class. After working on fruit flies and barnacles as an undergrad in the Rand Lab, he headed to Cornell to do his PhD with Andy Clark. For his PhD, he studied the evolution of the Drosophila immune system, using both quantative genetics and comparative genomics approaches. As a PhD student, he was involved in the first large comparative genomics project, the sequencing of 12 Drosophila genomes. After defending his PhD in 2008, Tim moved to Harvard to do a postdoc in the labs of Dan Hartl and then Scott Edwards, where he was introduced to vertebrate genomics, working on birds.
Tim joined the informatics group in 2015, and was promoted to the Director position in July 2017.