Michael Rosbash

Michael Rosbash (born March 7, 1944) is an American molecular biologist renowned for his pioneering discoveries elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms, the internal biological clocks that regulate daily physiological processes in organisms from flies to humans.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, to German-Jewish immigrant parents who had fled Nazi persecution—his father Alfred was a cantor and his mother Hilda a cytologist—Rosbash grew up in the Boston area, attending high school in Newton, Massachusetts. He earned a B.S. in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1965 and a Ph.D. in biophysics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970, where his doctoral research under Sheldon Penman focused on eukaryotic gene expression and RNA processing.

Michael Rosbash was born on March 7, 1944, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany six years earlier. His mother, Hilda Rosbash (née Sonntag, born 1914 in Berlin), came from a secular, middle-class family; her father, Magnus Sonntag, owned a pharmacy called Marien-Apotheke. His father, Alfred Rosbash (born 1912 in Baden-Baden), was the son of Joel Rosbasch, who had emigrated from Ukraine to Germany around 1907 and worked in a cigarette factory before opening a grocery store. Alfred had studied law in Germany but became a cantor after the family's arrival in the United States.