The rockefeller university

RECIPIENT OF THE HONORARY DEGREE

Growing up in South Florida, Michael Young encountered a wide variety of flora and fauna. These early exposures to fascinating creatures stimulated in him a naturalist’s interest in plants and animals. Later, he took apart motorcycles and put them back together again, which cultivated an aptitude for visualizing how pieces of machinery contribute to function. As a scientist, he united these interests and talents, elucidating details about how a complex biological system works.

Dr. Young graduated from The University of Texas, Austin, with a bachelor’s degree in biology and continued at the same institution for graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in genetics in 1975. By then, the recombinant DNA revolution had exploded, and he went to Stanford University School of Medicine for postdoctoral work with David Hogness to learn the new technology. In 1978, he accepted a faculty position at The Rockefeller University, where he dove into the study of circadian rhythms in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

He isolated the period gene, which plays a crucial role in synchronizing the insect’s sleep–wake cycle with the day–night cycle, and identified the second gene in this system, timeless, as well as four others. Interactions among these genes’ products and other elements drive changes in their expression and subcellular location. These activities, in turn, underlie the genetic oscillations that characterize the 24-hour rhythms in activity, metabolism, and sleep. The system can adapt to changes in the day–night cycle as occurs with the annual cycle of seasons. The same mechanisms that govern the fly’s internal clock also operate in many other species, including humans. Results from Dr. Young and his colleagues have suggested that defects in the clock gene CRY1 contribute to a common form of insomnia called delayed sleep phase disorder.

As the Vice President for Academic Affairs between 2004 and 2023, Dr. Young led Rockefeller’s new approach to faculty recruitment. This open-search program has brought talented investigators in a wide range of fields to the university, and it has bolstered connections and collegiality across campus.

Dr. Young is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is also an honorary member of the U.K.’s Physiological Society. His many honors include the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, Canada’s Gairdner International Award, and the Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine.