Rob Rawson studied botany and history at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1982. After a few years in the computer business in the San Francisco Bay Area, he earned a Master's degree in Biology from the California State University, Hayward (now Cal State East Bay) in 1987. He received a PhD in Genetics and Development from the University of Texas Southwestern Graduate School of Biomedical Science in 1993. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein in the Department of Molecular Genetics at U.T. Southwestern. There he participated in the identification of the two-step proteolytic processing of the membrane-bound transcription factors SREBP-1 and -2, isolation of CHO mutant cells defective in SREBP cleavage at site 1 and site 2, and the expression cloning of the two proteases. In 1999, he joined the faculty of Molecular Genetics and continues research into the control of lipid metabolism in vertebrates and insects.
