Roger Y. Tsien - Personal Life

Personal Life

Tsien and his family are descendants of the royal family of the Kingdom of Wuyue. According to historic records, Tsien is the 34th-generational grandson of the King Qian Liu (Tsien Liu).

Tsien had a number of accomplished engineers in his extended family, including his father Hsue-Chu Tsien who was a mechanical engineer and his mother's brothers who were engineering professors at MIT. Both of Tsien's parents came from Zhejiang Province, China. The famous rocket scientist Tsien Hsue-shen, regarded as the co-founding father of JPL of Caltech and later the director of the Chinese ballistic-missile and space programs, is a cousin of Tsien's father. Tsien's brother Richard Tsien is also a renowned scientist currently at New York University. Tsien, who calls his own work molecular engineering, once said, "I'm doomed by heredity to do this kind of work."

Tsien was born in New York, in 1952. He grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Livingston High School there.

Tsien suffered from asthma as a child, and as a result, he was often indoors. He spent hours conducting chemistry experiments in his basement laboratory. When he was 16, he won first prize in the nationwide Westinghouse talent search with a project investigating how metals bind to thiocyanate.

He attended Harvard University on a National Merit Scholarship, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. He graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry and physics in 1972. According to his freshman-year roommate, economist and Iowa politician Herman Quirmbach, “It’s probably not an exaggeration to say he’s the smartest person I ever met... nd I have met a lot of brilliant people.”

After completing his bachelor's degree, he joined the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England with the aid of a Marshall Scholarship. He received his PhD in physiology from Churchill College, University of Cambridge in 1977, with the doctoral dissertation The Design and Use of Organic Chemical Tools in Cellular Physiology (1976) supervised by Prof. Jeremy Sanders.

Tsien was a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge from 1977 to 1981. He was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1982 to 1989. Since 1989 he has been working at the University of California, San Diego, as Professor of Pharmacology and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.