The well-known U.S. non-profit research institute, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, announced on September 30 that its new president will be University of California (UC), Berkeley professor Robert Tjian.

Dr. Tjian, an Academia Sinica Academician since 1990, will start his term as president of the institute next April. A distinguished professor of biochemistry and molecular biology who has been working at UC Berkeley for nearly 30 years, Dr. Tjian is most well-known for his contribution to decoding the human genome and his investigations into the structure and function of the eukaryotic transcriptional apparatus. He completed his post-doctoral research at Harvard University in the early 1970s and has received many awards for his work including being named California Scientist of the Year in 1994, and received the General Motors Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Prize in 1999. His work has been supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator program since 1987.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one of the largest and most prestigious privately-funded institutes researching biology and medicine in the USA. It was founded by aviator and engineer Howard Hughes in 1953 and will have an endowment of $17.5 billion at the end of the 2008 fiscal year, making it one of the richest philanthropic medical research institutes in the world. Every year the institute supports more than 350 investigators including several Nobel laureates.