James E. Rothman, Ph.D.
Professor Rothman is one of the world's most distinguished biochemists and cell biologists. At Columbia he is the Clyde
and
Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of
Physiology and Cellular Biophysics and the Director of the
Judith P.
Sulzberger, M.D. Columbia Genome Center. Dr. Rothman
received his
Ph.D. degree in biological chemistry from Harvard Medical
School in
1976. After completing a fellowship in the Department of
Biology at
MIT, he was Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at
Stanford
University and later the E.R. Squibb Professor of Molecular
Biology
at Princeton University. Before joining the Columbia faculty
in 2004,
Dr. Rothman founded and chaired the Department of Cellular
Biochemistry and Biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
Cancer Center, where he was the Paul Marks Chair and Vice Chairman
of Sloan- Kettering.
Dr. Rothman has received many prestigious awards recognizing
his work, including Columbia's Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize and
the Lasker Award. He is a member of the National Academy of
Sciences and its
Institute of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts
and Sciences.
He is renowned for discovering the molecular machinery
responsible for transfer of materials among compartments within cells.
This
discovery provided a unified conceptual framework for
understanding
such diverse and important processes as the release of
insulin into the blood, communication between nerve cells in
the brain, and the entry of viruses like the AIDS virus to
infect cells. Numerous kinds of tiny membrane-enveloped
vesicles ferry packets of enclosed cargo.
Each type of vesicle must somehow deliver its specialized
cargo to
the correct destination among the maze of distinct
compartments that comprise the cytoplasm of a complex animal
cell. Understanding the
delivery process, termed membrane fusion, is as fundamental
for
physiology as it is central for cell biology because
alterations in
these pathways are important in cancer, diabetes, and
central nervous system diseases. Membrane fusion is the
target for the next
generation of drugs to control AIDS. His current research in
this
area is on the biophysics and physiologic regulation of
membrane fusion. |
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