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H. Robert Horvitz

H. Robert Horvitz

Photo courtesy Kent Dayton

  • phone: 617-253-4671
  • fax: 617-253-8126
  • MIT address: 68-425A
  • email: horvitz@mit.edu
Meet Bob Horvitz

 

Learning from worms
H. Robert Horvitz has devoted much of his career to studying the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Only 1 mm long and containing fewer than 1000 cells, C. elegans has proved to be remarkably informative for studying many biological problems, including the genetic control of development and behavior and the mechanisms that underlie neurodegenerative disease.
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Biography
H. Robert Horvitz, a founding member of the McGovern Institute, is the David Koch Professor in the Department of Biology, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Horvitz received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974 and has been a faculty member at MIT's Department of Biology since 1978. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2002 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and characterizing the genes controlling cell death in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans.

Watch Horvitz's Nobel lecture>>

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize from the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience. In 2005, he was awarded the James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award which recognizes extraordinary professional accomplishment by full-time members of the MIT faculty.