Dr. Richard J. Roberts is the Chief Scientific Officer at New England Biolabs, Beverly, Massachusetts. He received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1968 from Sheffield University and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard before moving to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In 1977 his laboratory discovered split genes and mRNA splicing for which he received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1993. His research now focuses on bioinformatic analysis of genome sequences and studies of bacterial DNA methylation.