Michael W. Young

Michael W. Young is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the biological clock — the internal timekeeping system that governs sleep, metabolism, immunity, and nearly every aspect of human physiology. He is the Richard and Jeanne Fisher Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Genetics at The Rockefeller University in New York, where he has conducted research since 1978, and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Over more than four decades, his laboratory has produced a series of landmark discoveries that collectively explain how living organisms synchronize their biology to the 24-hour cycle of the Earth.

Nobel science speaker Michael W. Young is best known for identifying the molecular machinery of the circadian clock. Working with fruit flies, his laboratory isolated the period gene in 1984 — a critical step in revealing how biological rhythms are encoded in DNA. He then discovered the timeless gene, showing that its protein binds to the PERIOD protein to create a self-regulating feedback loop that keeps biological time with extraordinary precision. He subsequently identified the doubletime gene, which fine-tunes the frequency of these oscillations to exactly 24 hours. For these discoveries, Young was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Jeffrey C. Hall and Michael Rosbash, recognizing a body of work that fundamentally changed biology, medicine, and our understanding of what it means to be healthy.

The implications of this research are vast. Circadian clocks regulate not only sleep but also metabolism, immune response, hormone cycles, blood pressure, pain sensitivity, learning, and memory. Young’s later work has extended these findings into human health — investigating inherited sleep disorders such as delayed sleep phase disorder, exploring how disruptions to the biological clock contribute to metabolic disease, and examining how nutrition and aging interact with circadian function.

The Science of Timing — and What It Means for Human Performance

A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Young has been recognized with the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine, the Massry Prize, the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, and Columbia University’s Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, among many others.

As a speaker, Michael W. Young brings the rigor of Nobel Prize-winning science to questions that affect every organization: how sleep deprivation degrades decision-making, why shift work and jet lag carry measurable health costs, and how leaders can use chronobiology to design teams, schedules, and wellness programs that work with — rather than against — human biology. Audiences leave with a scientifically grounded understanding of performance, recovery, and longevity, and concrete insight into how circadian science is reshaping medicine, nutrition, and workplace design.