Our Team

Chris Rongo is a Professor at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, with a joint appointment in the Department of Genetics at Rutgers University. He obtained his B.A. in Molecular Biology (1990) at the University of California San Diego. We did his graduate studies with Dr. Ruth Lehmann at the Whitehead Institute, earning his Ph.D. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. He then trained as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Joshua Kaplan, initially in the Department of Molecular Biology at MGH/Harvard Medical School, but subsequently moving to the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. He started his own research lab at the Waksman at Rutgers in 2000. He is the recipient of the Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences Award and the 2012 American Heart Association Researcher of the Year Award. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, the New Jersey Commission on Spinal Cord Research, the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research, and the New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research. During his training, he was a National Sciences Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research Postdoctoral Fellow. Born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, Dr. Rongo now enjoys living close to the Atlantic ocean and New York City.