Victor Ambros

Victor Ambros grew up in Vermont and graduated from MIT in 1975. He did his Ph.D. thesis research (1976-1979) with David Baltimore at MIT, studying poliovirus genome structure and replication. He began to study the genetic pathways controlling developmental timing in the nematode C. elegans as a postdoc in H. Robert Horvitz's lab at MIT and continued those studies while on the faculty of Harvard (1984-1992), Dartmouth (1992-2007) and the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (2008-present). In 1993, Ambros and co-workers Rosalind Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum identified the first microRNA, the product of the heterochronic gene lin-4 in C. elegans, a discovery that was recognized in 2024 by the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, shared by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun. Currently, the chief research interest of the Ambros lab is understanding the roles of microRNA-mediated regulatory pathways in animal development and human disease.