Christianson earned his bachelor's degree from Harvard College in 1983, and remained at Harvard University to complete his master's and doctoral studies in 1985 and 1987, respectively.[1] He joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1988,[2] and is the Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor in Chemistry and Chemical Biology.[3] Christianson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.[4] Christianson won the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (1999) and the Repligen Award in Chemistry of Biological Processes (2013) from the Biological Division of the American Chemical Society. He was the Underwood Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry and a Visiting Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University (2006), the Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute (2015-2016), and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in 2016.
