Jonathan S. Weissman

Dr. Jonathan S. Weissman currently serves as professor of biology and member of the Whitehead Institute. He is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and co-leads the Laboratory for Genomic Research, funded by GlaxoSmithKline, which drives development of CRISPR-based therapeutics. He also serves as chairman of the scientific advisory board for the Stowers Institute and serves on the scientific advisory board for Amgen and the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation. Prior to joining the Whitehead Institute, Jonathan held various faculty positions at the University of California, San Francisco, which culminated in his role as vice chair of the Department of Cellular & Molecular Pharmacology. Additionally, Jonathan is a co-founder of KSQ Therapeutics.

Jonathan is widely recognized for building innovative tools for broadly interrogating the organizational principals of biological systems. These include ribosome profiling for globally monitoring protein translation and the development of CRISPRi/a to enable fine-tuned modulating human gene expression at genome scale. He has received the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery, and the Keith R. Porter Lecture Award from the American Society for Cell Biology. Jonathan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jonathan holds an A.B. in physics, summa cum laude, from Harvard College. After obtaining a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Dr. Peter Kim, Jonathan pursued postdoctoral fellowship training in Arthur Horwich’s laboratory at Yale University School of Medicine.