Dr. Roger D. Kornberg

Biography

Dr. Roger D. Kornberg is world’s leading prominent scientist and a professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He earned his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. degree in chemical physics from Stanford in 1972. He became a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England and then an Assistant Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1976, before moving to his present position as Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford Medical School in 1978. Dr. Kornberg is the fellow of National Academy of Sciences, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member of Royal Society. He has got quite a number of awards, such as Harvey Prize (1997), Welch Award in Chemistry (2001), and most notably, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his studies of the molecular mechanism of eukaryotic transcription. He made the major discovery that transmission of gene regulatory signals to the RNA polymerase machinery is accomplished by an additional protein complex that they dubbed Mediator. Dr. Kornberg’s research is directed towards the mechanism and regulation of RNA polymerase II transcription. Transcription is the first step and the key control point in the pathway of gene expression. Transcriptional regulation underlies development, oncogenesis, and other fundamental processes. In eukaryotes the enzyme RNA Polymerase II is responsible for transcription of messenger RNA making pol’s regulation central to gene expression. We seek to reconstitute the entire process from promoter chromatin remodeling to transcript synthesis with pure proteins and nucleic acids, to solve the structures of the proteins, and to elucidate their functional interactions.

Research Interest

Structural Biology,Transcriptional regulation underlies development, oncogenesis, and other fundamental processes