Claire M. Fraser
President and Director
The Institute for Genomic Research
Rockville, Maryland
cmfraser@tigr.org

Dr. Claire M. Fraser was elected as President and Director of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD in September 1998, where she had previously served as Vice-President of Research and Director of the Department of Microbial Genomics. TIGR is devoted to the sequencing and functional analysis of human, animal, plant, and microbial genomes to better understand the role that genes play in development, evolution, physiology and disease.

Dr. Fraser is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received a B.S. in Biology, summa cum laude, in 1977. She received a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1981. Following one year of post-doctoral training at SUNY at Buffalo, Dr. Fraser was appointed as a faculty member in the Department of Molecular Immunology at Roswell Park Memorial Institute in Buffalo, New York. She subsequently spent eight years at the National Institutes of Health and was appointed Chief of the Section of Molecular Neurobiology at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 1989. Dr. Fraser joined The Institute for Genomic Research in 1992.

Throughout much of her early career, Dr. Fraser's interests focused on the structure and function of G protein-coupled receptors. She was the first investigator to develop monoclonal antibodies against this class of receptors and predicted the existence of a large receptor family several years before the first receptor in this family was cloned and sequenced. Dr. Fraser was also one of the first investigators to utilize molecular biology to study receptor questions and has made a number of fundamental discoveries on the mechanisms of G protein-coupled receptor function.

At TIGR, she was initially involved in studies to elucidate differences in gene expression in human tumors and matched normal tissues and in using a genomic-based approach to understand the molecular basis of tumor development. More recently, Dr. Fraser has been involved in whole genome sequence analysis of microbial genomes, leading the teams that sequenced the genomes of Mycoplasma genitalium, the smallest genome of any known free-living organism, and the two spirochetes, Treponema pallidum and Borrelia burgdorferi.

Dr. Fraser has over 130 publications in leading scientific journals, is a reviewer for nine journals, has edited two volumes in the Receptor Biochemistry and Methodology series on neurotransmitter receptors, was previously an editor for the International Encyclopedia of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, and is currently serving on the Editorial Board of The Journal of Biological Chemistry and Comparative and Microbial Genomics. Dr. Fraser is a member of six professional societies. She was selected as one of Maryland's Top 100 Women in 1997 and was awarded the 1998 Computerworld Smithsonian Award for Innovation in Information Technology.

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