Virginia Cornish


Virginia Wood Cornish is the Helena Rubinstein Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University.

Background and education

Cornish received her B.A. in chemistry in 1991, working with professor Ronald Breslow. Her Ph.D. research, on site-specific protein labeling and mutagenesis, was carried out with Peter Schultz. Cornish was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at MIT with Prof. Robert Sauer.

Research

Cornish and her lab group use the tools of systems biology, synthetic biology, and DNA encoding to produce desired chemical products from specific organismic hosts. In 2016, she was part of a notable group of genomic scientists calling for increased ethical study and self-regulation as the costs and effort of creating de novo genomes plummeted. As the "read" phase of the Human Genome Project was completed in 2004, this new effort was dubbed Genome Project-Write.

Awards