Jonathan Weissman is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Landon T. Clay Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With Jennifer Doudna, he was a founding co-director of the Innovative Genomics Institute of Berkeley and UCSF and is now the head of its SAB. His development of the technique of Ribosome Profiling, as well as CRISPRi and CRISPRa, giving us the ability to turn on and off any desired gene, are revolutionizing both basic science and medical research.

Dr. Weissman received his undergraduate physics degree from Harvard College. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Peter Kim, Dr. Weissman pursued postdoctoral fellowship training in Arthur Horwich's laboratory at Yale University School of Medicine.

Dr. Weissman's numerous honors include the 2008 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, the 2015 Keith R Porter Lecture Award from the American Society of Cell Biology, the 2015 National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery, election as a foreign associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2017, and the 2020 Ira Herskowitz Award.