Dr. Robert Tjian
Board Member, Science Advisory Board Member, Audit Committee Member

Dr. Tjian joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1979, where he assumed several leadership roles including director of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center, faculty director of the Li Ka Shing Center for Biomedical and Health Sciences, and head of the Siebel Stem Initiative. He taught thousands of undergraduate students while doing biomedical discovery research. He has received many scientific awards including election to the US National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, Alfred P. Sloan Prize, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, and California Scientist of the Year, and has been an HHMI investigator since 1987.

He served as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2009-2016), a non-profit organization that supports basic biomedical research with an endowment of ~$20 billion and an annual budget of $950 million. He currently holds the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair in Biology and serves as scientific advisor to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the BioHub.

Dr. Tjian earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He was a co-founder of Tularik Inc., joined The Column Group as a discovery partner in September 2016, and sits on the board of several TCG portfolio biotech companies. He has been on the Board of Directors of the Curci Foundation since 2018.