He was named a MacArthur ‘genius’ fellow for research on gene regulation, but still has imposter syndrome
The youngest of this year’s class of MacArthur “genius grant” fellows, 35-year-old Jason Buenrostro was just a graduate student when he pioneered a technique that’s become a mainstay for studying how cells regulate gene expression.
While doing his doctoral work at Stanford University, with geneticists William Greenleaf and Howard Chang, he developed the assay for transposase-accessible chromatin, or ATAC-seq, a highly sensitive and accurate method for identifying regions of the genome that are open, or accessible, for initiating the production of proteins encoded by the DNA.
