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Born on this day
Theodor Fontane
Theodor Fontane was a German novelist and poet.
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30 December 2024

Important personalitiesBack

Randy Wayne Schekman30.12.1948

Wikipedia (24 Mar 2014, 14:17)

Randy Wayne Schekman (born December 30, 1948) is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011 he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high profile open access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof.


Early life

Schekman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Alfred Schekman, an electrical engineer and inventor. He graduated from Western High School in Anaheim, California, in 1966. He received a BA in Molecular Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1971. He spent his third year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, as an exchange student. He received a PhD in 1975 from Stanford University for research on DNA replication working with Arthur Kornberg. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1994.


Research

Since 1991, Schekman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. The Schekman Lab at that university carries out research into molecular descriptions of the process of membrane assembly and vesicular traffic in eukaryotic cells including yeast. Before that, he was a faculty member with the now disbanded Department of Biochemistry at the same university.


Awards

In 2002, Schekman received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University along with James Rothman for their discovery of cellular membrane trafficking, a process that cells use to organize their activities and communicate with their environment. He was awarded the Massry Prize from the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, in 2010. Schekman is also a member of the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize.

In 2013, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

Schekman, Thomas C. Südhof, and James Rothman were awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells". Schekman "has already said he will donate his share of the prize money, $400,000, to create an endowment for the Esther and Wendy Schekman Chair in Basic Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley. Schekman’s mother and sister, for whom the post is named, both died of cancer."

   
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