If you are going to crack the human genome, or diagnose cancers when they are only one millimetre in diameter, you have to be ambitious. Thomas Hudson says he learned to think big during the early 1990s, when some were calling the plan to decipher the human genome impossible.

His genome work began when Hudson, an allergist and immunologist, joined Eric Lander's laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research/MIT Center for Genome Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a postdoc. Hudson supervised a team of engineers, biologists and computer scientists who built one of the first high-throughput robots for replicating short segments of DNA. 'Genomatron' could perform 300,000 polymerase chain reactions daily and sent the project into high gear.

Hudson became the project leader for the physical map of the human genome and later the sequence map, nurturing a competitive, but collaborative group dynamic. “Each time we launched one of these big projects it got done way ahead of time, under cost and the results were much better than we anticipated, because we learned from each other,” says Hudson. In 1995 he became the assistant director of the Whitehead Institute and held that position until 2001.

Meanwhile, in 1996, he returned to Canada to run the Montreal Genome Centre, which later became the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre. But he kept close ties with his collaborators in Massachusetts, and went on to publish a trio of papers in Nature Genetics that sparked the International HapMap project. “That's when this centre became a true genome centre,” says Hudson. “Everyone wanted to be as good as the Sanger Centre and the Broad Institute. It spilled over into other projects, in terms of quality control and team spirit.”

His thoughts then turned to experimental therapeutics and diagnostics. A job offer to direct the newly created Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, in Toronto, Canada, came at the right time. Since July 2006, Hudson has been setting up this multidisciplinary, multi-institutional translational research centre that carries a five-year funding commitment of Can$350 million (US$305 million).

“Tom has the capacity to hold on to lots of disparate information and then creatively bring it together to see where the connections are,” says John Rioux, associate professor of medicine at the University of Montreal and Montreal Heart Institute. “It's important for the science and doesn't hurt in a leadership position.”