Barry Stoddard is a native of the Northwest region of the United States: he was born in Montana and has lived in Northern Idaho and Washington State for most of his life.  He attended Whitman College and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and a minor in Biology in 1985.  After working for the Monsanto Corporation in St. Louis, he entered graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his doctorate in 1990 in Biophysical Chemistry.  Following his subsequent postdoctoral work at the University of California in Berkeley, Dr. Stoddard joined the faculty at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle in December 1992, where he has supervised a research laboratory ever since.  He was promoted to Full Member at the Hutch in 1999. He is also an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and Director of the NCI Interdisciplinary Training Program in Cancer in Seattle.  He serves as the Senior Editor of the Journal Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford University Press).

Dr. Stoddard’s research interests are in the structure, mechanism, and engineering of proteins and enzymatic catalysts for basic research and biomedical applications.  His lab conducts wide-ranging research on gene-specific endonucleases, nucleic acid enzymes, structural enzymology and protein engineering.  He has coauthored over 170 research articles and reviews in these fields since 1990.  In 2004, he was one of several recipients of the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for published work in the field of protein engineering.

Dr. Stoddard has served (and continues to serve) as a consultant and scientific advisor for several companies, as well as for the Institute for Defense Analysis and for several patent law firms.  He was a cofounder of a biotech startup company (Pregenen Inc.) that was acquired by Bluebird Bio Inc. in 2014.

Dr. Stoddard lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife Amy. His boys (Ben and Zach) are both engineers. He enjoys reading, traveling, theater, music, skiing, golfing, diving, drinking good wine and interesting cocktails, and eating virtually anything (except olives and lentils, both of which he hates).  In general, he is willing to try anything interesting at least once and has yet to regret doing so.

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