After 30 years of teaching biology and 21 years of conducting investigative research at UC Berkeley, Professor Robert Tjian will become president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, officials announced yesterday.

Tjian said he will oversee financial and research sectors of the institute, which is one of the largest private funders of research in the country. He will succeed former UC Berkeley graduate student Thomas Cech, who has been president since 2000.

"As president and CEO … one of the attractions about the job is that they've already hired great people who will be working with me," said Tjian, whose term begins Sept. 9, 2009. "I think I'll already have a really good team there working with biology and education."

Since 1987, Tjian has been a Howard Hughes investigator, with the institute funding his research and salary. There are about 15 investigators at UC Berkeley and 50 throughout the UC system, out of 350 investigators nationwide, Tjian said.

Michael Botchan, co-chair of UC Berkeley's department of molecular and cell biology, commended the institute for selecting Tjian.

"(Tjian) has made an extraordinary contribution to our lives at Cal in so many ways as a teacher, scientist and colleague and of course his efforts here will be less but his heart will still be in Berkeley," Botchan said in an e-mail.

Tjian is not the first campus researcher to be offered a position at the institute. He said he is glad to be joining former UC Berkeley genetics professor Gerald Rubin, who has been vice president and director of the institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus since 2003.

"It's really nice for me to work with someone who I'm already really familiar with," Tjian said.

As president, Tjian said he hopes to fund new areas of research through the institute and is especially interested in the institute's role in supporting undergraduate and graduate education.

"I certainly hope I can help the institution achieve its goals of promoting science in the country and perhaps at the international level," he said. "I think education is a big piece of it-in other words, there's no science unless you have students."

In addition to being a UC Berkeley professor and researcher, Tjian is the director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center. He runs a campus lab that uses stem cell research to study tissue differentiation and the molecular basis of diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, muscular atrophy and neurodegenerative diseases.

Now he will also head a new lab run by the institute in Virginia. The lab will study what Tjian calls single-cell biochemistry, which employs new biotechnology to further understand the genetic basis of disease.

"It really uses very sophisticated microscopes and fluorescent proteins to kind of track all these molecules that are reading this DNA, but in a live cell," he said of the new research.

He said he will be flying back and forth between the institute and UC Berkeley in order to run both labs.

Tjian was named California Scientist of the Year in 1994 by the California Science Center. Before that, he studied biochemistry at UC Berkeley.

Tjian said he always knew he wanted to return to the campus as a professor.

"There's no better place to teach than at Berkeley … It was the only one job I wanted," he said. "It's been great, and I look forward to coming back someday."

Tags: HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE, BIOCHEMISTRY