Joe DeRisi Honored with Lifetime Achievement Award by Stanford Medicine

The Stanford Medicine Alumni Association (SMAA) has selected Chan Zuckerberg Biohub San Francisco President and UC San Francisco Professor Joe DeRisi as a recipient of the Arthur Kornberg and Paul Berg Lifetime Achievement Award in Biomedical Sciences. The annual award honors exceptional career contributions from “the most distinguished Stanford University School of Medicine alumni in the biomedical sciences.”

By the time he earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford in 1999, DeRisi was already pioneering DNA microarray technology and whole-genome expression profiling. Just a few years later, as a young professor at UCSF, DeRisi’s work contributed to the identification of the SARS-1 coronavirus. Since then, DeRisi has been a leading advocate of the development and application of unbiased methods for pathogen discovery, disease tracking, and clinical diagnostics, particularly through the use of metagenomic sequencing.

DeRisi’s efforts have increased the power, versatility, and clinical utility of metagenomic tools to combat infectious disease, laying the groundwork for the CZ ID platform now used for pathogen surveillance and diagnostics in low- and middle-income countries around the world.

“Dr. DeRisi’s research has had a broad and important impact on our ability to identify and study unrecognized biothreats,” said SMAA President Deval Lashkari. “His work not only contributed to the identification of the SARS-1 coronavirus, but he’s now conducting groundbreaking research into the deadliest form of human malaria. We are thrilled to honor his remarkable accomplishments.”

View a tribute video by Stanford Medicine Alumni Association.

This month, Delve Bio, a UCSF-affiliated company co-founded by DeRisi, announced the commercial launch of Delve Detect, a metagenomic test that can detect more than 68,000 pathogens in cerebrospinal fluid, delivering results in 48 hours or less. Delve Detect offers a valuable new tool for doctors treating patients with meningitis and encephalitis, potentially life-threatening conditions that can be difficult to diagnose and treat.

In addition to his longstanding work with metagenomics to track and diagnose infectious diseases, in recent years, together with colleagues at UCSF, DeRisi has done extensive research with programmable phage display technologies to investigate autoimmune diseases.

DeRisi is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. He was a Searle Scholar, Packard Fellow, and, before co-launching CZ Biohub SF in 2016, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Earlier this year, he was included in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Influence List,” a roster of 20 local leaders whose work is shaping the future of San Francisco. 

DeRisi received the Lifetime Achievement award at a banquet on the Stanford School of Medicine campus on Dec. 14, alongside the award’s second recipient, Stanford Professor of Pathology Garry Nolan, who was recognized for his many contributions to immunology and cancer research. 

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About CZ Biohub San Francisco: A nonprofit biomedical research center founded in 2016, CZ Biohub SF is part of the CZ Biohub Network, a group of research institutes created and supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. CZ Biohub SF’s researchers, engineers, and data scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at our partner universities — Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; and the University of California, San Francisco — seek to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying disease and develop new technologies that will lead to actionable diagnostics and effective therapies. Learn more at czbiohub.org/sf.