Roger D. Kornberg, Ph.D.

Dr. Kornberg is a professor of structural biology and the Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor in Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine where his research is focused on understanding the fundamental workings of gene regulation.

Prof. Kornberg was awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his seminal studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription, the biological process by which genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA.

From 1984 to 1992, Dr. Kornberg served as chair of the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford. Kornberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Prof. Kornberg has been honored for his work with the Eli Lilly Award, the Passano Award, the Ciba-Drew Award, the Gairdner International Award (shared with R. Roeder), the Hoppe-Seyler Lecture Award, the Harvey Prize from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), the ASBMB-Merck Award, the Pasarow Award in Cancer Research, the Le Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer, and the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize.

Dr. Kornberg earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University. Following postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, he joined the scientific staff there. He later became part of the faculty in the Department of Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School and eventually returned to Stanford as professor of structural biology. His recent honors include the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation’s Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize, the Pasarow Award in Cancer Research from the Pasarow Foundation, and Le Grand Prix Charles-Leopold Mayer from the Académie des Sciences in France. He also is a co-recipient of the Merck Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Kornberg is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.