Jerry L. Workman

Jerry L. Workman is a biochemist who pioneered studies of chromatin in transcription regulation. His group defined nucleosomes/transcription factor interactions and their role in recruiting chromatin modifying complexes. They purified the first histone-modifying chromatin co-activator complexes, which initiated biochemical studies of epigenetics. They discovered the Set2/Rpd3S pathway to repair chromatin during transcription and nuclear complexes of metabolic enzymes linking histone modification to metabolism. Workman was born in northwest Illinois and received a B.S. in Biology from Northern Illinois University in 1979. He received his PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan in 1985. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University and Mass. Gen. Hospital/Harvard Medical School. In 1992 he joined the faculty at the Penn. State where he served as the Paul Berg Professor of Biochemistry and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2003 he became an Investigator of the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. Workman is a fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary lifetime member of the Japanese Biochemical Society and a Changjiang “Yangtze River” Scholar of the Chinese Ministry of Education.