Tetrahedron Symposium Speaker Biography

Roger Y. Tsien

Roger Y. Tsien was born in New York City in 1952 and received his A.B. in Chemistry and Physics summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1972. A Marshall Scholarship then took him to the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 and remained as a Research Fellow until 1981. He then became an Assistant, Associate, then full Professor in the Dept. of Physiology-Anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Depts. of Pharmacology and of Chemistry & Biochemistry. In 1996 he was a scientific co-founder of Aurora Biosciences Corporation, which went public in 1997 and was acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals in 2001. In 1999 he was a scientific co-founder of Senomyx, Inc.

His honors include 1st prize in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (1968), Searle Scholar Award (1983), Passano Foundation Young Scientist Award (1991), W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University (1991), Artois-Baillet-Latour Health Prize (1995), Gairdner Foundation International Award (1995), American Heart Association Basic Research Prize (1995), Pearse Prize of the Royal Microscopical Society (2000), Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society (2002), Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society (2002), the Max Delbruck Medal (2002), the Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002), the Wolf Prize in Medicine (shared with Robert Weinberg, 2004), the Keio Medical Science Prize, Keio University (2004), the J. Allyn Taylor International Prize in Medicine (2005), and the Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Sciences (2006). He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1995, the National Academy of Sciences in 1998, and to the Royal Society (as a Foreign Member) in 2006.

Dr. Tsien's research has been at the interfaces between organic chemistry, cell biology, and neurobiology, starting long before such interdisciplinary efforts became fashionable. He is best known for designing and building molecules that either report or perturb signal transduction inside living cells. These molecules, created by organic synthesis or by engineering naturally fluorescent proteins, have enabled many laboratories including his to gain new insights into signaling via calcium, sodium, pH, cyclic nucleotides, nitric oxide, inositol polyphosphates, membrane potential changes, protein phosphorylation, active export of proteins from the nucleus, and gene transcription. The optical reporter molecules are also valuable in miniaturized high-throughput screening of candidate drugs in the pharmaceutical industry. His current research goals are to understand how the spatial and temporal dynamics of signal transduction orchestrate complex cellular responses such as gene expression and synaptic plasticity. These goals will require improved molecular techniques to see and manipulate small-molecule messengers, protein phosphorylation, and protein-protein interaction in live cells and organisms. He is also developing new ways to target contrast agents and therapeutic agents to tumor cells based on their expression of extracellular proteases.