About UChicago Argonne, LLC
Board of Governors
Lawrence Schook
Vice President for Research, University of Illinois
Lawrence B. Schook is the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences on the Urbana campus. Schook also serves as the Director of the Division of Biomedical Sciences responsible for directing strategic alliances related to health research and leading the Illinois Health Sciences Initiative that coordinates Urbana campus research and educational programs. He holds joint appointments in bioengineering, nutritional sciences, and in pathology, part of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, based at UIC, and has faculty appointments with the Institute for Genomic Biology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
Schook graduated from Albion College in 1972 and received his Ph.D. in 1978 from Wayne State School of Medicine. After postdoctoral training at the Institute for Clinical Immunology in Switzerland and the University of Michigan, he has held faculty positions at the Medical College of Virginia, University of Minnesota and a visiting Professor at the Ludwig Cancer Center of the University of Lausanne.
He is a recognized international scholar in comparative genomics and exploiting genomic diversity to understand genetic diseases. His research focuses on the genetic resistance to disease, regenerative medicine, and using genomics to create animal models for biomedical research. In 2009, Schook announced that a global collaborative he led had produced a first draft of the genome of a domesticated pig. The $24 million sequencing project involved an international team of scientists and genome-sequencing centers and was partially funded by $10 million from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. He has received over $25 million in sponsored research from governmental and industrial sources.
Central to his scholarship has been the development of innovative graduate training and entrepreneurial activities across campus and the community. He has been an active leader of efforts to establish innovative graduate programs spanning across diverse disciplines and promoting innovation and entrepreneurship across campus and the community.
A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Schook is a recipient of NIH, Swiss National Fund and Pardee Fellowships. He has received numerous honors from the Urbana campus including being named a University Scholar, receiving the Funk Award for Meritorious Achievements in Agriculture, the H. H. Mitchell Award for Graduate Teaching and Research, and the Pfizer Animal Health Research Award. His scholarly activities include authoring more than 200 publications and editing six books. He is the founding editor of Animal Biotechnology.
