Jared Roach

Jared C. Roach is an American biologist who introduced the pairwise end sequencing strategy while at the University of Washington.
Education and early career.
Roach attended Cornell University, where he received his Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1990. He then attended the University of Washington, where he received his PhD in Immunology in 1998, and his MD in 1999. He trained in Internal Medicine at the University of Utah through 2001.
Career.
Starting as graduate student in the 1990s, Roach worked on the Human Genome Project from its early days through the end of the project in 2003. He contributed strategic and algorithmic designs to the Human Genome Project, including the pairwise end-sequencing strategy.
Roach was a Senior Fellow at the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington from 1999-2000. In 2001, he became a Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology.
In 2009, he was a leader of a team that sequenced the whole genomes of a human family of four. This effort identified the cause of Miller syndrome, a simple recessive Mendelian disorder. It also produced the first complete whole-chromosomal haplotypes in humans. Haplotyping is the process of assigning all the variants in the genome to paternal and maternal chromosomes. The team applied these techniques to identify the causes of several Mendelian diseases, including genes for Adams-Oliver syndrome, alternating hemiplegia of childhood, epilepsy, palmoplantar keratoderma, and Fanconi anemia.
From 2007 to 2009, he was Scientific Director of the High-throughput Data Analysis Laboratory at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Since then, he has been a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology. Roach's group currently applies systems biology and genomics to complex diseases, focussing on the systems biology architecture of Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2020, Roach was a spokesperson for the molecular phylogenetics of SARS-CoV-2.
Selected publications.
Roach has over 80 publications with over 8000 citations. He has also translated a book on the Asian game of Go. His most-cited articles are: