Lon Cardon

Lon Cardon, PhD, FMedSci, is an internationally recognized human geneticist who joined The Jackson Laboratory -- an independent, non-profit biomedical research institution -- as its president and chief executive officer in November 2021. A demonstrated leader in academic, pharma and biotech research, he was previously the chief scientific officer and chief scientific strategy officer at BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. Before joining BioMarin, Cardon held leadership roles at GlaxoSmithKline.

Cardon spent the first half of his career in academic research -- as a faculty member at the University of Oxford and at the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics, where he was head of bioinformatics and statistical genetics and later, a principal fellow and professor of bioinformatics. He was also a professor of biostatistics at the University of Washington and co-chair of the Herbold Bioinformatics Program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

Cardon conducted his PhD research at the Institute for Behavior Genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder and completed postdoctoral training in mathematics at Stanford University. His research groups have been involved in large international genetics initiatives that helped to create the present global genomics research infrastructure, including the first Genome-Wide Association Studies; the discovery of numerous genes responsible for rare diseases; and the development of new treatments for genetic disorders.

Cardon has chaired and served on numerous public and private boards in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Europe and has authored more than 225 scientific publications and 15 books and chapters, mainly focused on genetics methodology, applications, and discoveries in rare and common diseases. He is an elected fellow of the United Kingdom’s Academy of Medical Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.