Hughes Institute Chooses President
Berkeley Professor Is Esteemed Scientist

By Philip Rucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 1, 2008

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the world's richest philanthropies and a leading funder of U.S. biomedical research, announced yesterday that it has tapped a distinguished biochemistry and molecular biology professor as its new president.

Robert Tjian, of the University of California, Berkeley, will take the helm of the Chevy Chase-based nonprofit institute in April. Tjian succeeds Thomas R. Cech, who has served as president since 2000 and will return to full-time research and teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

With an endowment of $17.5 billion, the institute founded by Howard R. Hughes, the late aviator, engineer and film producer, funds the research of more than 350 scientists at about 67 institutions through its flagship investigators program. The Hughes Institute is among the largest benefactors of scientific research in the United States and is influential in scientific policy debates.

Tjian, 59, whose work has been supported by the Hughes investigators program since 1987, has conducted pioneering research toward decoding the human genome.

"Research is ultimately my biggest passion," Tjian said in a telephone interview yesterday. "The leadership of an institution like the Hughes, whose primary mission is to make sure that really great research continues to be supported, means that the person at the top has to have a really good, deep understanding of what research is."

Tjian is credited with having discovered proteins that bind to specific sections of DNA and play a role in controlling how genetic information is transcribed into the thousands of biomolecules that keep cells, tissues and organisms alive.

Hanna H. Gray, chairman of the Hughes Institute Board of Trustees and head of the presidential search committee, said Tjian was a top candidate because of his scientific achievement and commitment to mentoring young scientists.

"He is known as a person of impeccable taste in science who commands a great breadth of understanding across the life sciences," Gray said in a statement.

Tjian (pronounced TEE-jen), the youngest of nine children, was born in Hong Kong as his family fled China because of the Communist Revolution. The family went to Argentina and Brazil before settling in New Jersey, where Tjian attended high school.

He received a bachelor's degree from Berkeley in 1971 and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1976. In nearly three decades on the Berkeley faculty, Tjian has held several leadership roles, most recently as director of the Stem Cell Center.

In 1994, Tjian was named California Scientist of the Year, and he has been awarded the Alfred P. Sloan Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.