John Kuriyan is the dean of basic sciences and a professor of biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

He was formerly the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of molecular and cell biology (MCB) and chemistry, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's physical biosciences division, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

[4] Kuriyan did postdoctoral research work for one year supervised by Karplus at Harvard before becoming an assistant professor at the Rockefeller University.

As of 2015[update] Kuriyan's laboratory studies the structure and mechanism of enzymes and other proteins that transduce cellular signals and perform DNA replication.

Kuriyan was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2015.