Director of the Genomics Platform

Niall J. Lennon, Ph.D. is the Chair of the Board and Chief Scientific Officer of Broad Clinical Labs, the Broad Institute’s wholly owned subsidiary that develops, implements, and validates innovative technologies that enable transformative advances in scientific discovery, clinical research, and diagnostic medicine. He is also Senior Director of the Genomics Platform and an Institute Scientist at the Broad Institute.

Dr Lennon has been with the Broad Institute for over 20 years and has contributed to the development of applications for every major next generation sequencing platform across a range of fields. In 2013, Dr. Lennon built Broad Clinical Labs, a CLIA/CAP licensed clinical laboratory at the Broad, to facilitate return of results to patients and to support clinical trials. Dr. Lennon has led efforts to achieve FDA approval for both large-scale genomics projects (as co-Chair of the regulatory working group for NIH’s All of Us Research Project) and for Broad’s own clinical diagnostic for COVID-19 testing process that delivered >37 million diagnostic test results to people in the New England region during the pandemic. In 2025, Niall led a team that collaborated with Roche to achieve a world record for the fastest human genome sequenced.

Dr Lennon received a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from University College Dublin and completed his Postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He holds an executive certificate in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lennon also served as Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University from 2012 to 2024 where he taught a popular course on Molecular Biotechnology to hundreds of graduate and undergraduate students.