Department of Biomedical Sciences and Chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University, MA, USA

Heinrich Wieland Prize 1990 for ground-breaking work on the enzymology of intracellular membrane fusion

Research

Rothman excels in his research on vesicular transport and intracellular membrane fusion. He has described key molecular processes explaining how transport vesicles carrying various cargo like hormones or neurotransmitters are built, find their correct destination within cells, and fuse with their target membrane to release their contents. Studying the Golgi Appartus, Rothman discovered the so-called NSF, SNAP, and SNARE proteins necessary for membrane fusion. He also revealed principles of synaptic transmission in nerve cells. For his achievements, he was honoured with the Nobel Prize last year.

Academic Career

Rothman received his PhD in biological chemistry at Harvard University in 1976 and worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before holding professorships at Stanford and Princeton Universities. Rothman is widely credited as a key force in the rise to pre-eminence of science at Sloan-Kettering, where he stayed from 1991 to 2004 and served as vice-chairman.  Prior to coming to Yale in 2008, he was Director of Columbia University’s Sulzberger Genome Center.

Selected Honours & Memberships

Heinrich Wieland Prize (1990), Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2002), Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (2010), Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2013)

National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences