Dr. Robert Kingston is Chief Academic Officer and Senior Vice President for Research and Education at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Kingston began working on bacterial transcription mechanism as a student with Dr. Michael Chamberlin in 1977.  He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 for work on understanding the regulation of rRNA synthesis.  He trained as a Jane Coffin Childs Fellow with Dr. Philip Sharp at MIT, where he switched to studying transcriptional regulatory mechanisms in humans.  Dr. Kingston joined the Department of Molecular Biology at MGH and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School in 1985 as an Assistant Professor of Genetics.  He became a Professor of Genetics in 1995.  His work over the past twenty years has been primarily on understanding the regulation of chromatin structure and how that impacts gene regulation in mammals, with a focus on the epigenetic mechanisms that maintain gene expression states during mammalian development. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.