Prof. Hieronim Jakubowski

Hieronim Jakubowski obtained his MSc degree in physical chemistry from the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań (1969), a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Agricultural University of Poznań (1974), and a DSc in biochemistry from the IBB, Warsaw (1978). He was a postdoc at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA (1975–76) and a FEBS Fellow at the Hanover Medical School, Germany (Apr–Jul 1982). He was an EMBO Fellow at the Imperial College, London, UK (Nov–Dec 1980), where he discovered the biological synthesis of homocysteine thiolactone. He took a yeast genetics and molecular biology course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, USA (Jul–Aug 1987). He received the title of professor (Dec 2007); a Gold Cross of Merit (2021) from the Polish President; and a Scientific Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Minister of Science and Education, Poland. He has made seminal discoveries in the fields of error-editing via tRNA synthetases and the origin of the genetic code, which was the foundation for his more recent discoveries of mechanisms involved in the incorporation of homocysteine into protein, as well as his studies of homocysteine-containing proteins and their role in cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. He is an adjunct professor of microbiology, biochemistry, and molecular Genetics at Rutgers University, New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, USA, and a professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, University of Life Sciences, Poznań.