Michael W. Young

Rockefeller University

Michael Warren Young is an American geneticist and chronobiologist, the Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor and head of the Laboratory of Genetics at the Rockefeller University, where he has also served as Vice President for Academic Affairs. He shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael Rosbash for discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm. Working independently with the fruit fly Drosophila, Young's laboratory discovered the timeless (tim) gene, whose protein TIM partners with PER to control the timing of its entry into the cell nucleus, and the doubletime (dbt) gene, whose kinase product phosphorylates PER to set the pace of the clock and adjust the length of the daily cycle. Together these discoveries completed the mechanistic picture of the circadian feedback loop, explaining how light entrains the clock and how the period of oscillation is tuned to approximately twenty-four hours. Young's work later connected fly clock genetics to human biology, including the identification of clock-gene variants associated with familial advanced sleep-phase syndrome and delayed sleep-phase disorder. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, he had earlier received the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (2009), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2011), the Massry Prize (2012), the Canada Gairdner International Award (2012), the Wiley Prize (2013) and the Shaw Prize (2013). His sleep- and clock-genetics program makes his laboratory a relevant buyer for fly-genetics reagents, kinase assays, behavioral-monitoring instrumentation and human-sequencing services.