Thomas R. Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 2000, announced Tuesday that he will step down from his leadership post in spring 2009. HealthNewsDigest.com reports that Mr. Cech will return to his position as a medical investigator with the Hughes Institute working at the University of Colorado, where he has been a faculty member since 1978.

Mr. Cech, who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, said he was “ready to return to the adventure of my own research and my own teaching.”

Mr. Cech oversaw major changes in the institute’s flagship investigator program that, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, has made it one of the largest private sources of funds for scientific research.