Biography

Professor Kornberg has served as our director since February 2008. Professor Kornberg is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Winzer Professor of Medicine in the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He has been a member of the faculty of Stanford University since 1972. Prior to that he was a professor at Harvard Medical School. In 2006, Professor Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription, the process by which DNA is copied to RNA. Professor Kornberg is also the recipient of several awards, including the 2001 Welch Prize, the highest award granted in the field of chemistry in the United States, and the 2002 Leopold Mayer Prize, the highest award granted in the field of biomedical sciences from the French Academy of Sciences. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University in 1972. He holds honorary degrees from universities in Europe and Israel, including the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he currently is a visiting professor.