Jeremy Schmutz graduated in three years with a B.S. in computer science and a B.A. in biology from North Central College. Throughout his undergraduate career Schmutz worked on DNA sequencing technology at Argonne National Laboratory. This led him to his first research position at a small silicon valley startup company before he joined the Sequencing Group at the Stanford Human Genome Center in 1996. There Schmutz developed the computational infrastructure necessary for large scale DNA sequencing and assisted in finishing and assembling the human sequence of chromosomes 5, 16, and 19. He also led the quality assessment of the human genome sequence that evaluated the accuracy and completeness of the final human genome sequence. Arriving at HudsonAlpha in 2008, Schmutz now leads the Informatics and Production Sequencing Groups at the Genome Sequencing Center, still continuing to work on genome sequencing projects of plants and fungi.