Ronald M. Evans, PhD Dr. Ronald M. Evans is known for his discovery of the superfamily of genes encoding nuclear receptor hormone receptors and the elucidation of their universal mechanism of action, a process that governs how lipophilic hormones and drugs regulate virtually every developmental and metabolic pathway in animals and humans. He obtained his Ph.D. in from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine in 1974 and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University in New York studying transcriptional regulation. In 1977 he joined of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Gene Expression Laboratory. Since 1986 he holds the March of Dimes Chair in Molecular and Developmental Biology Dr. Evans studies the mechanisms through which link steroids, retinoids, and thyroid hormones regulate gene expression. These hormones control fundamental aspects of physiology including sugar, salt and fat metabolism, basal metabolic rate and reproduction. In 1985 his group cloned and characterized the first nuclear hormone receptor, the human glucocorticoid receptor. His subsequent isolation of the mineralocorticoid, thyroid, retinoic acid (vitamin A) and retinoid X receptors established the existence of the nuclear receptor superfamily revealing an underlying unity in their mechanism of action. This work led to the principles of DNA recognition, receptor heterodimer formation, and the discovery of the DNA coding mechanism for hormone response elements. Over the past ten years, he has focused on the characterization of the so-called "orphan" members of the nuclear receptor family for which no physiologic ligands were known. He isolated the first orphan receptors and has pioneered biochemical and molecular techniques that led to the identification of the first orphan ligands. This process is known as reverse endocrinology. Many of the new ligands turn out to be simple metabolic products of common dietary lipids such as cholesterol and free fatty acids. He has used these discoveries to establish unique roles for nuclear receptors in cancer and metabolic disease such as obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerosis. Evans' discoveries on the nuclear hormone receptors define a unitary signaling pathway and a central paradigm for the control of eukaryotic gene expression. His work establishes a transcriptional basis to physiology and has led to the discovery of a new generation of drugs for cancer and metabolic disease. He has received numerous awards, most recently: the Fred Koch Award from the Society for Endocrinology (1999), the First Bristol-Myers Squibb Award in Metabolic Research (2000), City of Medicine Award from Duke University (2002), the March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology, the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation Alfred P. Sloan Medal, the Keio Medical Science Prize (2003) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2004). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, was named the 1994 California Scientist of the Year by the California Museum of Science and Industry and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and the Institutes of Medicine in 2003. He is listed by the Institute of Scientific Information as one of the 10 most cited scientists of the past two decades.