About the author
BA from Harvard College in 1967 and PhD in Chemistry from Stanford
University in 1972, Prof. Roger Kornberg is Winzer Professor in Medicine in the
Department of Structural Biology at
Stanford University. In his doctoral research, he demonstrated the diffusional
motions of lipids in membranes, termed flip-flop and lateral diffusion. He was
a postdoctoral fellow and member of the
scientific staff at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England
from 1972-5, where he discovered the nucleosome, the basic unit of DNA coiling
in chromosomes. He moved to his present
position in 1978, where his research has focused on the mechanism and
regulation of eukaryotic gene transcription. Notable findings include the demonstration
of the role of nucleosomes in
transcriptional regulation, the establishment of a yeast RNA polymerase II
transcription system and the isolation of all the proteins involved, the
discovery of the Mediator of
transcriptional regulation, the development of two-dimensional protein
crystallization and its application to transcription proteins, and the atomic
structure determination of an RNA polymerase II
transcribing complex.
Prof. Kornberg was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in
1993. He has received many awards, including the 2001 Welch prize, highest
award in chemistry in the United States, the
2002 Leopold Mayer Prize, highest award in biomedical sciences of the
French Academy of Sciences, and the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (unshared).
Romberg's closest collaborator has been
his wife, Dr. Yahli Lorch. They have three children, Guy, Maya, and Gil.