Bik Kwoon Tye

Bik Kwoon Yeung Tye (Chinese: 戴楊碧瓘; born c. 1947) is a Chinese-American molecular geneticist and structural biologist.

[6] Tye was born and raised in Hong Kong where she attended St. Stephen's Girls’ College from kindergarten through high school.

She then obtained a full scholarship to pursue undergraduate studies in chemistry at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, USA and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1969.

in biochemistry at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) supervised by Cho Hao Li (李卓皓).

Following her master's in 1971, Tye pursued Ph.D. training in genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the joint mentorship of David Botstein and Joel Huberman.

[7] In her independent career, Tye began forging new discoveries surrounding DNA replication in eukaryotes, an understudied area at the time.

[8] Tye took a genetic approach to isolate mutants that regulate DNA replication, which led to her identification of the minichromosome maintenance (MCM) genes in yeast in 1984.

[9] Her findings together with the identification of the origin recognition complex (ORC) by Bell and Stillman in 1992[10] generated substantial momentum in the field of eukaryotic DNA replication.

[11][12] At Cornell, Tye mentored numerous graduate students, was the associate chair of the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular, and Cell Biology, directed the Genetics and Development Graduate Studies Program, and finally received her Emerita status in 2015 for her contributions to the Cornell community.

In 2011, Tye began a visiting professorship at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she addressed a large gap in the field: the lack of high-resolution structures for DNA replication complexes.

Four decades of eukaryotic DNA replication: from yeast genetics to high-resolution cryo-EM structures of the replisome.

Li J, Dong J, Wang W, Yu D, Fan X, Hui YC, Lee CSK, Lam WH, Alary N, Yang Y, Zhang Y, Zhao Q, Chen CL, Tye BK, Dang S, Zhai Y.

Lee CSK, Cheung MF, Li J, Zhao Y, Lam WH, Ho V, Rohs R, Zhai Y, Leung D, Tye BK.