About

Roger Brent , Ph.D. President and Research Director Email: brentmolsci.org Tel: 510-981-8744 Download NIH Biosketch (PDF format)

Roger was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1955. He received a BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1973, where he did some work attempting to apply AI techniques to protein folding. He went on to get a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1982 for studies with Mark Ptashne. As a graduate student, he showed that the E. coli lexA gene repressed genes involved in the response to radiation damage, cloned the gene, produced and purified its protein product using and in some cases extending the newly developed recombinant DNA methods, and studied binding of the repressor to its operators, showing that its differential binding affinity for these sites affected the timing of the response. As a postdoctoral fellow, also with Mark Ptashne, he tested a number of ideas about the mechanism of transcription regulation in yeast by using the prokaryotic LexA protein and in subsequent experiments creating chimeric proteins that carried LexA fused to activators native to yeast. These "domain swap" experiments established the modular nature of eukaryotic transcription regulators.

In 1985, Roger became a Professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School Department of Genetics. He and his coworkers used yeast transcription that depended on chimeric DNA bound proteins as a genetic probe for protein function in higher organisms. This work led to the development of working two-hybrid methods (1988-1993), to the ability to scale them up via interaction mating (1992-1994), and to the eventual development of protein interaction methods as a useful way to learn more about biological function. In parallel, Roger and his coworkers developed peptide aptamers as reverse "genetic" agents to study the function of proteins and allelic protein variants (1999-2001), and, more recently, as dominant forward "genetic" reagents to identify genes and pathway linkages in organisms, such as human cells, that are intractable to classical genetic analysis. (Perhaps as important as the actual technologies is the coeval development of ideology (e.g. doctrine) for using them.) This work is described in about 80 research papers and reviews.

In parallel to his academic work, Roger is a longtime (since 1984) advisor to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. He served on the SAB of American Home Products (Genetics Institute/Wyeth Ayerst Research), chairs scientific advisory boards for several smaller companies, and does significant ad hoc consulting work in genomics and computational biology. He is one of the founders (1987-2001) of Current Protocols, including Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, a "how to clone it" manual, which is updated every three months and has about 10,000 subscribing labs. He is founder and organizer (since 1994) of the "After the Genome" workshops. He is an inventor on 11 issued and several pending US Patents. Since the middle 1990s, he has exhorted and advised various bodies in the US and abroad on functional genomics and computational biology, including the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other parts of the US Defense Department.

Roger joined the Molecular Sciences Institute in 1998 as Associate Director. He was named Director in 2000 and President and CEO in 2001. Brent joined the faculty of UCSF Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences as an Adjunct Professor in 2000 and was named a Senior Scholar of the Ellison Medical Foundation in 2001.

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