Dr. 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. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression, especially RNA metabolism in yeast. However, he is best known 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.
Dr. 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. He then worked in the lab of Sheldon Penman at MIT 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. Dr. Rosbash joined Brandeis University in 1974. He became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 1989.
Dr. 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 most recently received the Peter Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine (2018) from the Harvard Medical School. 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. Dr. Rosbash has been awarded Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from University of Buenos Aires (2018) and from the University of Edinburgh (2019).
