About

Dr. Roger Kornberg is a professor at Stanford Medical School who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his research on the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription. Dr. Kornberg earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1967 and his PhD in chemical physics from Stanford in 1972. He became a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England and then an assistant professor of biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1976, before moving to his present position as professor of structural biology at Stanford Medical School in 1978.

Since its founding in 1976, the Roger Kornberg Lab has sought to reconstitute the entire process of transcription from promoter chromatin remodeling to transcript synthesis with pure proteins and nucleic acids, to solve the structures of the proteins, and to elucidate their functional interactions.

Kornberg’s father, the late Arthur Kornberg, was a professor of biochemistry at Stanford and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959. He was among the first to investigate nicotinamide riboside more than 60 years ago while at the NIH. Arthur Kornberg also established principles of DNA replication and RNA transcription in part from his early work on the synthesis of NAD+.