Allan S. Jacobson

Allan S. Jacobson is an American molecular biologist educated at the Bronx High School of Science who holds the Gerald and Zelda Haidak distinguished professorship at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, where he chaired the department of microbiology and physiological systems for nearly three decades. His research described the mechanisms controlling the stability of messenger RNA and translation termination, contributed to discovery of the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay pathway that degrades faulty transcripts, and developed the closed loop model describing how the two ends of a messenger RNA molecule interact during translation; he also co-founded the company PTC Therapeutics. He received a National Institutes of Health MERIT Award in 2005, was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology in 2011 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018, and received the Gruber Prize in Genetics in 2023.