Robert E. Kingston

In 1981, Kingston received his PhD after working on a number of research initiatives surrounding genome regulation and expression. Through an in vitro study that mapped termination sites dependent on the nusA protein, he discovered that in vivo rRNA transcription is regulated by turnstile attenuation, a mechanism that terminates rrnB chains in the leader region. He found that this happens because of the specific presence and location of pause sites, located 90 and 91 bases from the P1 promoter, which are sensitive to the presence of nusA protein and concentration of regulatory nucleotide guanosine tetraphosphate.

Kingston graduated from Harvard College in 1976. Four years later, he completed his PhD on bacterial regulatory mechanisms at the University of California, Berkeley, while under the mentorship of Michael Chamberlin. He then performed postdoctoral research on mammalian post-transcriptional mechanisms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Dr. Philip Sharp.

Robert E. Kingston (born in 1955) is an American biochemist who studies the functional and regulatory role nucleosomes play in gene expression, specifically during early development. After receiving his PhD (1981) and completing post-doctoral research, Kingston became an assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital (1985), where he started a research laboratory focused on understanding chromatin's structure with regards to transcriptional regulation. As a Harvard graduate himself, Kingston has served his alma mater through his leadership. He was the head of the Harvard's Biological and Biomedical Sciences PhD program from 2004 to 2007, the chair of the Molecular Biology Department at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2005 to present day, the vice-chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and the chair of the executive committee on research at Massachusetts General Hospital from 2012 to 2015. In addition to being a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, Kingston frequently organizes conferences and performs editorials on his research interests. In 2016, he was elected by his peers to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences.