Celebrating UW Medicine Faculty's Innovative Contributions to Healthcare

The UW Medicine Inventor of the Year award honors outstanding UW scientists whose inventions have had a major effect on both human health and our local economy. Each year, the Inventor of the Year selection committee solicits nominations from department chairs and administrators which are then reviewed based on the following criteria:​

Number of lives saved or improved | Biomedical impact of the invention | Contribution to the bioscience sector | Contributions to the UW CoMotion mission to extend the impact of the University of Washington research through the creation of partnerships that encourage investment in innovation | Contributions to the UW School of Medicine faculty community.

2022 Inventor of the Year Jay Shendure, M.D., Ph.D.

Jay Shendure, M.D., Ph.D., is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, Director of the Allen Discovery Center for Cell Lineage Tracing, and Scientific Director of the Brotman Baty Institute for Precision Medicine. His 2005 doctoral thesis with George Church included one of the first successful reductions to practice of next generation DNA sequencing. Dr. Shendure’s research group in Seattle pioneered exome sequencing and its earliest applications to gene discovery for Mendelian disorders and autism; cell-free DNA diagnostics for cancer and reproductive medicine; massively parallel reporter assays, saturation genome editing; whole organism lineage tracing, and massively parallel molecular profiling of single cells. Dr. Shendure is the recipient of the 2012 Curt Stern Award from the American Society of Human Genetics, the 2013 FEDERAprijs, a 2013 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the 2014 HudsonAlpha Life Sciences Prize, the 2018 Richard and Carol Hertzberg Prize for Technology Innovation, and the 2019 Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences. He has served as an advisor to the NIH Director, the US Precision Medicine Initiative, the National Human Genome Research Institute, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Allen Institutes for Cell Science and Immunology. He received his MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School in 2007.