Robert Tjian
Robert Tjian Nan Tse ( born September 22, 1949 in Hong Kong) is an American biochemist, professor at the University of California at Berkeley and president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Life
Robert Tjian was born in Hong Kong when his family fled the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. His family settled in Brazil, where his father - a former Chinese industrialist - founded a paper mill. 1963 Robert Tjian moved to the United States to New Jersey, where he attended high school.
Tjian acquired in 1971 from the University of California, Berkeley, a bachelor's degree in biochemistry in 1976 and a Ph.D. at Harvard University. As a postdoctoral fellow he worked with James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Tjian 1979 received a first professorship ( Assistant Professor ) in the Department of Molecular Biology and Cell Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, and in 1982 a full professorship. Over the years he made many - a, most recently as Director of the Centre for Stem Cell Research - partly conductive.
2009 took over from Robert Tjian Thomas R. Cech, the Office of the President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ( HHMI ). He leads research groups at Janelia Farm Research Campus ( an institution of the HHMI ) and at the University of Berkeley.
Tjian is married and has two daughters. His surname is pronounced ti ː dʒɛn. Occasionally the presence of his name as Robert Tijan.
Work
Tjian provided basic research results for the regulation of transcription in eukaryotes. Here, he went out of the virus SV40, which occasionally with the development of cancer ( oncogenesis ) is associated. Tjian showed that the tumor antigen of SV40 binds specifically to signal DNA of the host organism, that the activator AP1 two oncogene products and in that for cancer can be caused by disturbances in the transcriptional regulation. In Tjians working group could be identified, isolated and characterized in Drosophila melanogaster and humans over a period of about 20 years, about 100 transcription factors. Among other things, structural biology, biochemistry, genetic (e.g., gene knockdown, or DNA chip technology ) can be used, and optical methods.
Recent work dealing with the mechanisms of disturbed transcriptional regulation, the specific diseases ( such as diabetes mellitus, cancer, Parkinson 's disease or Huntington's disease ) are based.
Numerous biochemical methods have been developed or refined by Tjian. He is (together with David V. Goeddel and Steven L. McKnight ) founder of NASDAQ - traded biotechnology company Tularik Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, which was sold in 2004 for 1.3 billion U.S. dollars to Amgen.