Scholarship and Biography
Michael Rosbash is a Professor of Biology and the Peter Gruber Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Rosbash went to the Newton public schools in greater Boston and then to Caltech, graduating in 1965 with a B.S. in Chemistry. He spent the 1965-1966 academic year in Paris as a Fulbright Scholar in the lab of Marianne Grunberg-Monago and then entered the Ph.D. program at MIT in the fall of 1966. Rosbash worked there in the lab of Sheldon Penman and received a Ph.D. in Biophysics in 1970. After a brief stint at the University of St. Andrews, he was a post-doc in the lab of John Bishop in the Department of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh from 1971-1974. Rosbash joined the faculty of Brandeis University in 1974 and was promoted to Professor of Biology in 1986. He became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1989.
Rosbash has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression, especially RNA metabolism in yeast. He is best known however for his work in Drosophila that illuminated our current understanding of the molecular mechanisms that underlie circadian rhythms, the intrinsic clock that controls the cyclic behaviors of all animals. These same molecules, molecular machines and biological principles not only control Drosophila circadian clocks but also the ubiquitous process of circadian rhythmicity throughout the animal kingdom. This circadian clock also controls much of cell physiology and metabolism, again in all animals - from humans to Drosophila (fruit flies).
Rosbash and his Brandeis colleague Jeff Hall as well as Mike Young of the Rockefeller University have received numerous awards for their circadian work, including the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They previously received the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (2013), the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2013), the Massry Prize (2012), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2012), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Outstanding Basic Research (2011), and the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation Neuroscience Prize (2009). Rosbash also received the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award (2001), and he is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.