President Obama will nominate genetics pioneer Francis Collins to lead the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), the White House announced yesterday.

Collins was part of the team that discovered the gene that is mutated in cystic fibrosis. He later led the international public effort to sequence the human genome and the National Human Genome Research Institute.

NIH is the principle U.S. government agency that funds biomedical research; during the next year the NIH will fund $37 billion in research grants to scientists at universities and research institutions around the country and spend $4 billion on research conducted at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

Collins has publically discussed and written about his devout Christian beliefs and argues that science and faith are compatible. He established the BioLogos Foundation “to address the escalating culture war between science and faith in the United States.” Unlike many evangelical Christians in the United States, Collins supports human embryonic stem cell research and is an outspoken advocate of the genetic and geologic evidence supporting evolution by natural selection. “Evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true,” he wrote. “If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things.”

In May 2005 Collins and I had a brief encounter at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine graduation ceremony. I had been selected to give the student address (on behalf of all graduating PhDs). I knew I wasn’t good enough to give a funny speech, so I spoke about the duty scientists have to discuss their research with the public (something I’m still passionate about, one reason why I’m spending a year at the State Department). I got applause midway through the speech, and some of the faculty on stage and members of the audience actually stood up at the end, which doesn’t usually happen.

The speech ended, and I took my seat among the graduates, feeling pretty good about myself. Then Collins walked to the stage and after some opening remarks he withdrew a guitar from beneath the lectern and serenaded the audience with a rendition of the song ‘My Way,’ substituting cheeky, science-relevant lyrics for the original. (Watch a similar performance at the University of Michigan.)

The audience was blown away. I was no longer feeling so good about myself, instead I was grateful that I got to address the crowd before he did, and not after.

Collins received a well-deserved standing ovation and my admiration, proving that he is a rock star of science.