Congratulations to Joe Gray, Ph.D., who was inducted into the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)'s Entrepreneurs' Hall of Fame

Dr. Gray is the Gordon Moore professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, associate director of translational research in the Knight Cancer Institute, and director of the OHSU Center for Spatial Systems Biomedicine.

He was honored "for co-inventing chromosome painting, subsequently commercialized by Vysis to become an enabling technology for the genetic revolution." In chromosome painting, fluorescent dyes limited to specific genes or chromosomes are used to stain these sequences in individual cells. Vividly displayed on a computer monitor hooked up to a microscope, the colors indicate whether the stained regions are abnormal.

The LLNL honor recognizes current or former employees who have made significant contributions through their creativity, inventiveness and entrepreneurship in, or with, the private sector. Nominees’ accomplishments have had a significant commercial impact as measured by company valuation, commercially successful products or services, or royalties back to LLNL.

Dr. Gray was a biomedical scientist at LLNL from 1972 to 1991 before taking positions at UCSF and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He joined the OHSU faculty in January 2011.

On a related note, Dr. Gray was quoted in two recent New York Times articles on the promise of clinical applications of genome sequencing and on breast cancer genomics.