Jef D. Boeke (/ˈbuːkə/ BOO-kə[1]) is an American geneticist who is currently the founding director of the Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
[2] From 1986 to 2014 he was on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the High Throughput (HiT) Center.
He then received a PhD in Molecular Biology from Rockefeller University in 1982, where he worked with Peter Model and Norton Zinder on the genetics of the filamentous phage.
[6][7] Boeke is primarily known for his pioneering fundamental genetic and biochemical work on understanding the mechanisms of DNA transposition.
Boeke is currently leading an international team of collaborators in an effort to construct a synthetic version of the entire genome of Baker's Yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae.