Jef D. Boeke is an American geneticist who is currently the founding director of The Institute for Systems Genetics at NYU Langone Medical Center. From 1986 to 2014 he was on the faculty of The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was the founding director of the High Throughput (HiT) Center. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences. He is one of the co-founders of Genome Project-Write aiming at synthesis of human genome, and leader of the “Dark Matter Project” to begin parsing the function of non-coding DNA.