Gerald Fink

Who is Gerald Fink?

Gerald Fink is an American biologist, who was Director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT from 1990-2001. He graduated from Amherst College in 1962 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965, having elucidated the histidine pathway in the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After postdoctoral study at the NIH Institute with Bruce Ames on the regulation of the histidine operon of Salmonella, in 1967 he joined Cornell University where he became a Professor of Genetics and pursued the study of the HIS4 region of yeast. In 1982 he became a member of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Genetics at MIT. Dr. Fink was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1981, to the Institute of Medicine in 1996, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2003.

Fink taught a course in the Molecular Biology of Yeast at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for 17 years. Many of these students as well as his university students went on to have successful careers in molecular biology.