John Hearst
Dr. Hearst is a co-founder of Cerus Corporation where he served as a Director from 1991 to 2002 and as Vice President of New Science Opportunities from 1996 to 2004. He has had a long academic career, having been a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) from 1962 to 1996. As an Emeritus Professor, Dr. Hearst retains the position of Senior Staff Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL). He also served as Director of the Chemical Dynamics Division at LBL from 1986 to 1989. Dr. Hearst is well known for his work on psoralen photochemistry, DNA replication and transcription, DNA excision repair, DNA helix elasticity, the structure of eucaryotic chromosomes and the first DNA sequences of the reaction center and light harvesting genes associated with photosynthesis. The basic science foundation utilized in the Cerus photochemical inactivation technology was developed in the Hearst laboratory at UCB. He received a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Physics from the California Institute of Technology. In 1992, Dr. Hearst received an Honorary Doctorate (D.Sc.) from Lehigh University and received The Berkeley Citation from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999.