Visiting Senior Research Scientist

Eric Eisenstadt is a visiting Senior Research Scientist at IHMC and provides scientific and technical advice to the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency among others.

Eisenstadt received his A.B. and Ph.D. in biology from Washington University, St. Louis, and did postdoctoral work at the Université de Paris, Orsay (as a NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellow), at the Universität zu Köln as a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft Postdoctoral Fellow, and at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke as an NIH Staff Fellow.

Prior to becoming an Independent Technical Consultant, Eisenstadt was the VP for research at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and The Institute for Genomic Research. He also served as a Program Manager at DARPA, where he developed and managed basic and applied interdisciplinary research programs in various biotechnology areas such as genomic sequencing of pathogens, neurobiology, synthetic biology and protein design. Before joining DARPA, Eisenstadt was a program officer at the Office of Naval Research (ONR), where he developed and managed basic research programs in marine biotechnology (including a focus on life at high temperature and pressure), systems biology (with a focus on developing novel computational approaches to modeling biological systems), anaerobic bioremediation processes, and biomineralization. While at ONR, Eisenstadt was the Navy Representative to the Joint Service Technical Panel for Chemical and Biological Warfare Defense and served on ONR’s Historically Black Colleges Committee.

Before his government service, Eisenstadt was a member of the faculty at the Harvard University School of Public Health in the Department of Microbiology and the Laboratory of Toxicology where he taught and investigated mechanisms of mutagenesis and DNA repair in bacteria and yeast.