Robert G. Roeder
Life
Roeder earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1964 from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and in 1965 a master's in chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign, Illinois. In 1965 he was awarded a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Embryology in Baltimore, Maryland, before he received a Junior Professorship (1971 Assistant Professor, 1975 Associate Professor ) at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1979, he was just there a full professor in 1982 and received an appointment at the Rockefeller University, New York City.
Work
Roeder research field, the mechanisms and the regulation of gene expression during cell growth, cell differentiation and viral infection in eukaryotic cells. Roeder was able to make fundamental contributions to the study of the biochemistry of transcription. He and his research group discovered in 1969, the RNA polymerases, 1980 initiation of transcription factors and a first gene-specific transcriptional activator and 1984, the corresponding gene.