Richard Losick

Losick, an American molecular biologist documented among Jewish scientists in his field, has spent his career at Harvard, where he is an emeritus professor and was long a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professor. He is renowned for illuminating gene regulation and the developmental program by which the bacterium Bacillus subtilis forms dormant spores, revealing how a single cell orchestrates changes in gene expression to build different cell types. His work is a model for understanding cellular differentiation and has trained generations of scientists.