Tim Harris

Senior Fellow
Janelia Research Campus (HHMI)

Tim Harris is a Group Leader and Senior Fellow at the HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, VA. After his Ph.D. from Purdue University, Tim spent the following 18 very collaborative years at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. While at Bell, his work included high sensitivity fluorescence, the first use of CCD imagers for Raman scattering instrumentation, the characterization of quantum dots using a variety of spectroscopic tools, including the first report of fluorescence Near-Field Microscopy. In 1996 Harris moved to Seq Ltd. a small biotech startup in Princeton, NJ, where he led the development of high throughput multicolor confocal microscopy for cell based drug screening, deployed to pharmaceutical labs around the world. Harris moved to Helicos Biosciences in January 2004 as the founding technical employee where his team reported the first single molecule DNA sequencing. In 2008 Tim HHMI Janelia Research Campus. Among others, he initiated a project, now called Neuropixels, jointly funded by HHMI, The Allen Institute for Brain Research, Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, partnered with Cambridge University and University College London. The resulting probes are now available for purchase.