Professor Harran received his bachelors degree from Skidmore College in New York. He obtained a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1995 and completed an NIH-sponsored postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in 1997. That fall, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. In 2005, he was promoted to Full Professor and named the Mar Nell & F. Andrew Bell Distinguished Chair in Biochemistry. He joined the faculty at UCLA in July 2008 as the inaugural D.J. & J.M. Cram Chair in Organic Chemistry.