Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-geneticist. He is known for his discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the Human Genome Project. He was the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland from 2009 until 2021. In 2022, Collins became the Acting Science Advisor to the President during the Joe Biden administration.
Before being appointed director of the NIH, Collins led the Human Genome Project and other genomics research initiatives as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH.
Before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as a gene hunter at the University of Michigan. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.