Joshua Lederberg was an American geneticist and microbiologist who received the Nobel prize in 1958 for his work in bacterial genetics. Joshua Lederberg was born on May 23, 1925, in Montclair, New Jersey. Lederberg studied under Tatum at Yale (Ph.D., 1948) and taught at the University of Wisconsin (1947–59), where he established a department of medical genetics. In 1959 he joined the faculty of the Stanford Medical School, serving as director of the Kennedy Laboratories of Molecular Medicine there from 1962 to 1978, when he moved to New York City to become president of Rockefeller University. He received the US National Medal of Science in 1989. He died on February 2, 2008 in NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital.