[3] Victor grew up on a small dairy farm in Hartland, Vermont, in a family of eight children and attended Woodstock Union High School.

[2][9][11] In 1993, Ambros and his co-workers Rosalind Lee and Rhonda Feinbaum[12] reported in the journal Cell[13] that they had discovered single-stranded non-protein-coding regulatory RNA molecules in the organism C. elegans.

Previous research, including work by Ambros and Horvitz,[14][15] had revealed that a gene known as lin-4 was important for normal larval development of C. elegans, a nematode often studied as a model organism.

Furthermore, Ambros, together with Gary Ruvkun (Harvard), discovered that lin-4S was partially complementary to several sequences in the 3' untranslated region of the messenger RNA encoding the LIN-14 protein.

[17] In 2000, another C. elegans small RNA regulatory molecule, let-7, was characterized by the Ruvkun lab [18] and found to be conserved in many species, including vertebrates.

[22] In 2024 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Gary Ruvkun "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation".