© PAUL SIMCOCKWilliam Greenleaf has been at the forefront of life-science tool design since grad school, building a new type of DNA sequencer and pushing genomics technologies to unprecedented limits.
“Biology is becoming more of a playground for cross-disciplinary work, which is very exciting, because in the end, human biology is incredibly complicated,” says Greenleaf. “Now we finally have the tools to match some of that complexity.”
As a Harvard University physics major, Greenleaf applied his training to biological questions. During the summers, he worked in the laboratory of Julio Fernandez, then at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, using atomic force microscopy to detect structural changes in proteins at the single-atom level.
Greenleaf went on to do a PhD at Stanford University in biophysicist Steven Block’s lab. There, the young grad student was able to measure, at the single-molecule level, the energy and forces required for RNA polymerase transcription termination.1
Using an optical trapping ...
