Genomics is a discipline in genetics concerned with the study of the genomes of organisms. The field includes efforts to determine the entire DNA sequence of organisms and fine-scale genetic mapping. The field also includes studies of intragenomic phenomena such as heterosis, epistasis, pleiotropy and other interactions between loci and alleles within the genome. In contrast, the investigation of the roles and functions of single genes is a primary focus of molecular biology or genetics and is a common topic of modern medical and biological research. Research of single genes does not fall into the definition of genomics unless the aim of this genetic, pathway, and functional information analysis is to elucidate its effect on, place in, and response to the entire genome's networks.

For the United States Environmental Protection Agency, "the term "genomics" encompasses a broader scope of scientific inquiry associated technologies than when genomics was initially considered. A genome is the sum total of all an individual organism's genes. Thus, genomics is the study of all the genes of a cell, or tissue, at the DNA (genotype), mRNA (transcriptome), or protein (proteome) levels."

Barry Martin Schuler (born September 7, 1953 in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American Internet entrepreneur and former chairman and CEO of America Online Inc. He is best known for leading the AOL team that simplified the online service provider’s user interface, making it possible for millions of consumers to gain easy access to the Internet.

Barry Schuler grew up in West New York, New Jersey. As a suburban youth, Schuler was encouraged early on by his parents to explore the arts (photography, painting and sculpture) as well as electronics. He turned his family’s basement into a darkroom while helping his father, a warehouse owner and part-time repair man, tinker with television sets and other gadgetry.

In the mid-1970s, while completing a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Rutgers University, Schuler became captivated by filmmaking. In 1976, he left the university to produce and direct commercial and industrial films. An avid computer hobbyist and reader of Popular Electronics, Schuler befriended a group of technical enthusiasts who were developing software applications for microcomputers. After assembling a do-it-yourself IMSAI computer and experiencing first hand the potential of at-home computing, Schuler saw the technology’s ability to positively disrupt and enhance the way people lived and worked. In 1978, he established CMP Communications, an advertising and marketing company devoted to helping high tech entrepreneurs spread the word about the impending revolution in microcomputing.

Svante Pääbo (born 20 April 1955) is a Swedish biologist specializing in evolutionary genetics. He was born in 1955 in Stockholm to Sune Bergström, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane in 1982, and his mother, Estonian Karin Pääbo.

He earned his PhD from Uppsala University in 1986. Since 1997, he has been director of the Department of Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Pääbo's department in August 2002 published findings about the "language gene", FOXP2, which is lacking or damaged in some individuals with language disabilities.

Pääbo is known as one of the founders of paleogenetics, a discipline that uses the methods of genetics to study early humans and other ancient populations. In 2006, he announced a plan to reconstruct the entire genome of Neanderthals. In 2007, Pääbo was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 most influential people of the year.

In February 2009, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), it was announced that the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology had completed the first draft version of the Neanderthal genome. Over 3 billion base pairs were sequenced in collaboration with the 454 Life Sciences Corporation. This project, led by Pääbo, will shed new light on the recent evolutionary history of modern humans.^{[citation needed]}

David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, professor of biomolecular engineering and director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz, director of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) on the UC Santa Cruz campus, and a consulting professor at Stanford University School of Medicine and UC San Francisco Biopharmaceutical Sciences Department.

David Haussler’s research combines mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology. He develops new statistical and algorithmic methods to explore the molecular function and evolution of the human genome, integrating cross-species comparative and high-throughput genomics data to study gene structure, function, and regulation. He is credited with pioneering the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs), stochastic context-free grammars, and the discriminative kernel method for analyzing DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. He was the first to apply the latter methods to the genome-wide search for gene expression biomarkers in cancer, now a major effort of his laboratory.