C. Thomas Caskey

C. Thomas Caskey is an American internist who has been a prominent medical geneticist and biomedical entrepreneur. He is editor of the Annual Review of Medicine.

Caskey attended the University of South Carolina (1956–58) and the medical school at Duke University (1958–63). As a medical student, he was a student biochemical fellow (1961–62) with James B. Wyngarden, a pioneer in the study of the biochemical basis of metabolic disease. Caskey received his M.D. degree in 1963 and stayed on at Duke as intern and resident in the Department of Medicine (1963–65).

Caskey then went to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1965 to 1971. From 1965 to 1967 he was research associate at the National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) with Nobel Prize-winner Marshall Nirenberg. Caskey then became senior investigator, Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics (1967–70) and head, Section of Medical Genetics at NHLI (1970–71).

In 1971 Caskey left NIH to go to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. He stayed the next two decades. At Baylor he served as Chief, Section of Medical Genetics (1971–85) and Professor of Medicine and Biochemistry (1971–94). From 1976 to 1994 Caskey was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Baylor. While on sabbatical leave from Baylor in 1979–80, Caskey was a Faculty Scholar at the Cambridge University Medical Research Council unit with another Nobel Prize-winner Sydney Brenner.

In 1994 Caskey left academia to become senior vice president for research and trustee and president of The Merck Genome Research Institute at the Merck Research Laboratories in Sumneytown Pike, West Point, Pennsylvania.

In 2000 Caskey returned to Houston as founding director and CEO of Cogene Biotech Ventures and Cogene Ventures, venture capital funds designed to support early-stage biotechnology and life sciences companies using genome technology for drug discovery.

In 2006 Caskey was appointed director and CEO-elect of the Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases, part of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.