Anders Näär

Professor of Metabolic Biology at UC Berkeley

Speaker

Anders M. Näär is Professor and Vice Chair of Metabolic Biology and Nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley, with an affiliation at the Innovative Genomics Institute. He received a B.S. in biochemistry and biotechnology from the University of Lund, Sweden, and a Ph.D. in Molecular Pathology with M. Geoffrey Rosenfeld at UC San Diego and HHMI, working on nuclear hormone receptor control of gene expression. As a postdoctoral fellow with Robert Tjian at UC Berkeley and HHMI he discovered the human Mediator transcriptional coactivator complex. He was a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center from 2001 to 2018.

His laboratory has worked for two decades on the transcriptional control of lipid and energy metabolism, including the SREBP pathway that governs fatty acid and cholesterol synthesis. That work led to the rediscovery and mechanistic characterization of TOFA, reported in Science Advances in August 2026, and to ReRx Therapeutics, which he co-founded to develop it for obesity and metabolic disease. He is also CEO of Elenae Therapeutics, an RNA medicines company spun out of his laboratory.