Dr. Robert Tjian, Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology since 1979, recently also served as President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2009-2016), the 2nd largest private US, non-profit organization that supports basic biomedical research with an endowment of ~$18B and an annual budget of $850M.
He was born in Hong Kong (1949) during his family’s flight from China on their way to Argentina and later Brazil. In 1963 he moved to NJ where he attended high school before starting his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley (Class ’71).

Trained as a biochemist at Cal and Harvard, he was a pioneer in studying how genetic information in our DNA is decoded to sustain life. During nearly 4 decades on the faculty at Cal, he taught 1000’s of undergrads while doing biomedical discovery research. He has received many scientific awards including election to the US National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, was California Scientist of the Year and he has been an HHMI investigator since 1987.

Tjian’s research aims to understanding how the molecular machinery that reads DNA operates to drive gene expression in human cells. His recent work focuses on deciphering how regulatory genes control the ability of embryonic stem cells to self-renew and differentiate into various cell lineages such as muscle, fat, neurons, etc.
He has also co-founded biotech companies and now serves as scientific advisor to a venture capital fund and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in biomedical sciences.
Tjian and his wife Claudia, a retired corporate attorney, have two grown daughters, Alexis and Lindsey, who all live in the Bay Area.