Robert Tjian, Ph.D.

Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology
University of California, Berkeley
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Robert Tjian has been a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1979. From 2009 to 2016, he also served as President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the second largest private, non-profit organization in the United States, supporting basic biomedical research with an endowment of approximately $18 billion and an annual budget of $850 million.

Dr. Tjian was born in Hong Kong in 1949, during his family’s flight from China on their way to Argentina and later Brazil. In 1963, he moved to New Jersey, where he attended high school before starting his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley (class of ’71).

Trained as a biochemist at UC Berkeley and Harvard University, he was a pioneer in studying how genetic information in our DNA is decoded to sustain life. He discovered human proteins called transcription factors that unlock the genetic information encoded in our chromosomes, in the process called gene expression. Dr. Tjian’s research aims to understand how the molecular machinery that reads DNA operates to drive gene expression in human cells. His recent work focuses on using sophisticated microscopes capable of tracking single protein molecules and their dynamic behavior in living cells, in order to decipher how regulatory genes control the ability of embryonic stem cells to self-renew and differentiate into various cell lineages.

During nearly four decades on the faculty at UC Berkeley, Dr. Tjian has taught thousands of undergraduate students while conducting biomedical discovery research. He has received many scientific honors including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Named the 1994 California Scientist of the Year, Dr. Tjian has also been awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize. He has been an HHMI Investigator since 1987.

Dr. Tjian has also co-founded biotech companies and now serves as scientific advisor to a venture capital fund and to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in biomedical sciences.