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Gary B. Ruvkun, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and a microbiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in medicine, the Nobel Committee announced early Monday morning.

Ruvkun — who shared the award with Victor R. Ambros, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School — received the prize for their discovery of microRNA, “a new class of tiny RNA molecules that play a crucial role in gene regulation,” according to the Committee.

Ruvkun is the first Harvard Medical School professor to win a Nobel Prize in medicine in five years, when William G. Kaelin received the prize in 2019. The geneticist has been at Harvard since 1976, when he began his Ph.D. after obtaining his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ambros and Ruvkun were postdocs in the lab of H. Robert Horvutz, an MIT biology professor and 2002 Nobel Laureate, in the 1980s when they began working together on the research that would win them the Nobel nearly 40 years later.

Ambros himself taught at Harvard from 1984 to 1992, when he began teaching at Dartmouth College before later moving to the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

—Staff writer Rahem D. Hamid contributed to this report.