Mark Skolnick

He was born in 1946 in Temple, Texas, and earned his B.A. at University of California at Berkeley in 1968 and a Ph.D at Stanford University in 1975. His father taught a clinical post graduate course in psychoanalysis at Stanford, where Skolnick was introduced to the bright Stanford academics at a very young age. “It got put into my head pretty early on that medicine was interesting,” says Skolnick, “but it might be more interesting to be an academic than a doctor. I’m not sure I would have wanted to just focus on seeing ill people.”

Skolnick was very good at math but his parents also played a very significant role cultivating his interest in science and in societal causes. “I think I was driven a lot by actually wanting to do something of lasting social significance,” he said. At the age of fourteen he wanted to be a world health doctor, although his early talents were most visible in mathematics.

He studied economics at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on demography and anthropology. He was mostly interested in quantitative problems. He continued his graduate studies in demography in the same university and his ambition was to link these fields with genetics, studying individuals in a population, rather than large population trends. As he says, “The way you study individuals is in pedigrees, by linking fertility, mortality, migration-parameters for single individuals.”

He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1975. He then moved to the University of Utah where he began working in collaboration with the Departments of Medical Informatics, Biology, Cardiology and Genetics.

He directed the group that cloned the breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA1; found the full-length sequence of BRCA2.