Jeremy Schmutz joined the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in 2008 as a faculty investigator. He leads the Informatics and Production Sequencing Groups at the Genome Sequencing Center, which he co-directs with Jane Grimwood. Schmutz graduated from North Central College in Naperville, IL, in three years with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Biology. While in college, he worked on DNA sequencing technology at Argonne National Laboratory. That experience led to his first research position developing parallel sequencing systems at a small Silicon Valley startup company. In 1996, Schmutz joined the newly formed Sequencing Group at the Stanford Human Genome Center to develop the computational infrastructure necessary for large scale DNA sequencing. Schmutz and his group finished and assembled the human sequence of chromosomes 5, 16 and 19 for the public Human Genome Project. He also led the quality assessment of the human genome sequence that evaluated the accuracy and completeness of the final human genome sequence.