Roger Brent
Roger Brent (born December 28, 1955) is an American biologist who studies how cells regulate genes and how cell signaling varies from one cell to another. He works at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle as a Full Member of the Division of Basic Sciences and is an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.
He grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and earned a bachelors degree in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he used artificial intelligence ideas to study protein folding. He did his PhD at Harvard University in 1982 in Mark Ptashne’s lab and then did a postdoctoral fellowship there in 1985.
In Ptashne’s lab, Brent cloned the LexA repressor from E. coli and showed how it controls the cell’s response to DNA damage. He used LexA to control genes in yeast and built fusion proteins that connected LexA to parts of transcription regulators. These experiments helped reveal the domain structure of eukaryotic transcription factors. He showed that prokaryotic DNA-binding domains can be used to regulate gene expression in eukaryotes, contributing to tools like the Gal4 and LexA-based systems and the tetracycline-repressor system.
In 1985 Brent moved to Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where his work helped develop yeast two-hybrid methods and large-scale approaches to study protein interactions. In 1997 he helped establish the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley with Sydney Brenner and later served as its CEO, research director, and president. There he continued studying cell signaling and variation between cells.
Today he is a Professor of Basic Sciences at Fred Hutch and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences and Bioengineering at the University of Washington. Brent helped found Current Protocols in Molecular Biology in 1987 and organized the After the Genome workshops (1995–2000) that influenced early systems biology. He has advised government and industry on biology and its security and has contributed to ideas in synthetic biology. From 2011 to 2014 he directed the Center for Biological Futures to explore the social impacts of advances in biology.
Brent has received the Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine (2003) and was named a Fellow of the AAAS in 2011 for his work in biochemistry, transcription, genomics, and systems biology. He holds several U.S. patents related to gene regulation using DNA-binding proteins and is listed on multiple patents.
In 2006 he married Linda B. Buck, a biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 15:47 (CET).