Dr. Robert Kingston is the current chief academic officer and the former chair of the department of molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the former vice chair of the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is also the vice chair of the MGH Research Institute advisory council and past chair of the executive committee on research at MGH. Dr. Kingston is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Kingston began working on bacterial transcription mechanism in 1977 as a student with Dr. Michael Chamberlin. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1981 for his work on understanding the regulation of rRNA synthesis. He trained as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow with Dr. Philip Sharp at MIT, where he switched to studying transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in humans. Dr. Kingston joined the department of molecular biology at Mass General and the department of genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1985 as an assistant professor of genetics. He became a professor of genetics in 1995. His work over the past 20 years has been primarily on understanding the regulation of chromatin structure and how that impacts gene regulation in mammals with a focus on the epigenetic mechanisms that maintain gene expression states during development.
Dr. Kingston is the former head of the biological and biomedical sciences graduate program at Harvard Medical School. He has organized numerous international conferences on transcription, epigenetics, and chromatin structure and function. He serves on several editorial boards, is a founding editor of Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, has served as an editor at Molecular and Cellular Biology, and has served on the board of reviewing editors at Science.