Anthony Monaco

Anthony P. "Tony" Monaco (born October 10, 1959) is the President of Tufts University, having assumed the office in August 2011 from Lawrence Bacow.

Monaco was formerly a Professor of Human Genetics and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Planning & Resources) at the University of Oxford. He was also the Head of the Neurodevelopmental and Neurological Disorders Group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics.

Monaco was born in Wilmington, Delaware and graduated from the Salesianum School in 1977. He earned an undergraduate degree as an independent concentrator in neuroscience and behavior at Princeton University in 1981 and played goalie on their men's water polo team.

Monaco earned his Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Harvard University in 1987 and his M.D. in 1988 from Harvard Medical School. His doctoral research led to his landmark discovery of the gene responsible for X-linked Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophy. His fascination with genetics took him to the U.K., then the hub of this burgeoning field. He worked on the human genome project at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) in London and in the human genetics laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, Oxford.

As a distinguished neuroscientist, Monaco identified the first gene specifically involved in human speech and language. Nobel Prize winning biologist Paul Nurse states, "Tony Monaco was among the first to recognize the importance of what was still an emerging research frontier, human genetics, and its vast potential to address problems such as cancer and autism."