Kornberg

Roger D. Kornberg was awarded the Nobel Prize on October 4, 2006 for his studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. Roger D. Kornberg wrote many novel papers that explained the process by which the genetic information from DNA is copied to RNA. Kornberg is an accomplished American biochemist and is currently a professor of structural biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri on April 24, 1947 and is the oldest of three children. Roger's father, Arthur Kornberg also won a Nobel prize in medicine in 1959. Roger D. Kornberg received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1972. Kornberg worked on his post-doc at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge of the United Kingdom. In 1976, Roger became an assistant professor at Harvard in the department of biological chemistry. In 1978, Roger D. Kornberg returned as a professor at Stanford University in the structural biology department. From the years of 1984-1992, Kornberg served as the chair of the department. Currently, Kornberg continues to teach at Stanford and conducts research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for four months out of every year. Furthermore, Roger Kornberg is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.