These days, Heidi Williams ’03 assists scientists as they unlock the secrets of the human genome. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist embarked on her career path when, as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, she encountered the work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer.
“As soon as I found this kind of research, I thought, this is exactly what I want to do,” she tells Bloomberg.
With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Williams is researching how patent rules alter gene-related innovation, Bloomberg writes. “Ever since the sequencing of the human genome, there has been a sense that the science hasn’t panned out quite as quickly as people had hoped,” Williams tells Bloomberg.
With the NSF funding, Williams and her assistants are currently tracking the effects of patents on developments in genomics and creating an open-source database that will allow others to do the same thing, Bloomberg writes.
Read the full story, published 9/12/13 by Bloomberg.
