Andrew Zachary Fire PhD

Andrew Z. Fire was born in Santa Clara County, California (USA) in 1959. He majored in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained his degree in only three years, but genetics was to become his life's work. At the age of 19, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work in the laboratory of Professor Philip Sharp (a later Nobel Prize winner) on a new area of cell biology: the biochemistry that underlies gene expression in mammalian cells. After obtaining his Ph.D. (the subject of his 1983 dissertation was the genetics of adenoviruses), Fire left for Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where he worked with one of the fathers of molecular biology, Nobel Prizewinner Professor Sidney Brenner, on the DNA of the C. Elegans worm, which has played a key role in his research since then.

Between 1986 and 2003, Andrew Fire was a member of staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Embryology (Baltimore, USA), where he supervised dozens of students, Ph.D. candidates, and post-docs. In 2003 he moved his laboratory to Stanford University School of Medicine (Departments of Pathology and Genetics); in addition, he is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Fire has been the recipient of many scholarships and prizes, for example, the Maryland Distinguished Young Scientist Award (1997) and the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology (2003, together with Dr. Craig Mello). His colleagues praise his creativity and originality.