Dr. Darnell is a physician scientist who has pioneered next-generation approaches to understanding RNA genomics in human disease.  He is a world’s expert in translational science, developing pioneering work in neuroscience, immunology and oncology, through studies of the paraneoplastic neurologic disorders (PNDs).  PNDs are associated with autoimmune brain disease, cancer and tumor immunity.  This led him to discover the existence of neuron-specific systems for RNA regulation in the brain, and to then develop molecular approaches and new methods (CLIP) to understand their role in neurons and other cell types.  Dr. Darnell has worked with numerous colleagues, both within the laboratory, and in interdisciplinary studies with many labs, including Jerome Posner (numerous), Steve Burley (Cell 2000), Steve Warren (Cell 01), Lily Jan (Cell 05), Ben Blencowe (Nature 06), Gerry Fischbach & Steve Burden (PNAS 09), Maury Swanson (Neuron 12, HMG 13), Joan Steitz (EMBO J 12), Mike Wigler (Neuron 12), Greg Hannon (NSMB 2012), Sasha Rudensky (Mol Cell 12), Joan Massague (eLIFE, 14), Charlie Rice (Cell, 2015), Marc Tessier-Lavigne (eLife 16), Jim Hudspeth (Elife 2016), David Allis (Cell 2017), Evan Eichler (Cell 2017), Tom Maniatis (Genome Biol 2018), Mary Beth Hatten (Elife 2018), Cos Iadecola (Cell Rep 2019), Marc Tessier-Lavigne (Neuron 2019), Olga Troyanskaya (Nature Genet 2019, NEJM 2020), Eric Lander (Nature 2019) and Marcin Imielinski (Cell 2020). The ability of his laboratory and trainees to integrate with multiple types of collaborators, and to integrate biochemical, genetic and other data sets, are central to Dr. Darnell’s interest in promoting biomedical research collaboration. In recognition of these interests, Dr. Darnell is Founding Director and CEO Emeritus of the New York Genome Center, and has been elected a Member of the National Academy of Medicine (2010), the National Academy of Sciences (2014), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019).  He was the Principle Investigator of an NHGRI funded ($44.5M) grant for the NY Center for Collaborative Research in Common Disease Genomics, was awarded the NIH Directors Transformative Award by Francis Collins (2012), and the NINDS Outstanding Investigators Award (2016).  Dr. Darnell is the Heilbrunn Professor at Rockefeller University (1992) and was recently renewed as an HHMI Investigator (2002-2025).