Robert Horvitz
| H. Robert Horvitz | |
|---|---|
| Born | Howard Robert Horvitz May 8, 1947 Chicago |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Biology |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Modifications of the host RNA polymerase induced by coliphage T4 (1974) |
| Notable students | Gary Ruvkun |
| Known for | Apoptosis research |
| Notable awards |
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| Spouse | Martha Constantine-Paton |
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Website web |
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Howard Robert Horvitz (born May 8, 1947) is an American biologist best known for his research on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Sydney Brenner and John E. Sulston.
Horvitz was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Mary R. (Savit), a school teacher, and Oscar Freedom Horvitz, a GAO accountant. He majored in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined Alpha Epsilon Pi and spent his summers working for IBM, at first wiring panels for accounting machines and then in his final summer helping to develop IBM’s Conversational Programming System.
During his senior year, Horvitz took his first courses in biology and was encouraged by his professors to continue to study biology in graduate school, despite his limited coursework in the field. After he completed his undergraduate studies in 1968, he enrolled in graduate studies in biology at Harvard University, where he studied T4-induced modifications of E. coli RNA polymerase under the direction of Walter Gilbert and James Watson. He completed his PhD in 1974.
In 1974, Horvitz took a postdoctoral position at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, England, where he worked with his future Nobel prize co-winners Sydney Brenner and John Sulston on the genetics and cell lineage of C. elegans. In 1978, Horvitz was offered a faculty position at MIT, where he is currently Professor of Biology and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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