Stephen Buratowski
Stephen Buratowski, Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, is an international leader in the field of eukaryotic gene expression. His work led to the discovery that differential phosphorylation of the largest subunit of RNA polymerase II plays a key role in coupling transcription elongation with RNA processing and chromatin modifications. His discovery of the "CTD code" has had a major impact on the gene expression field. He also made important advances in understanding transcription activation and initiation, elucidating distinct mechanisms for transcription termination, and the roles of co-transcriptional histone modifications such as acetylation and methylation.
Buratowksi got his undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1984. His PhD thesis on the RNA polymerase II initiation complex was done in the lab of Phil Sharp at MIT. In 1990, he established his own lab as a Fellow at the Whitehead Institute. He moved to Harvard Medical School in 1994, where he has been a full professor since 2002.