Professor James Rothman
Chairman
Professor James Rothman, one of the world's most distinguished biochemists and cell biologists, is Professor and Chairman of the Yale University Department of Cell Biology and Executive Director of the Yale Center for High Throughput Cell Biology and is the Wallace Professor of the Biomedical Sciences.
Dr. Rothman received his Ph.D. degree in biological chemistry from Harvard Medical School in 1976. He also attended Harvard Medical School from 1971 to 1973. From 1976 to 1978, he completed a fellowship in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1988, he was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University. Dr. Rothman was the E.R. Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University (1988-1991); he founded and chaired the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (1991-2004), held the Paul A. Marks Chair, also served as Vice-Chairman of Sloan-Kettering. Prior to coming to Yale in 2008, Dr. Rothman was the Wu Professor of Chemical Biology in the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, and Director of Columbia University’s Sulzberger Genome Center.
James Rothman is renowned for discovering the molecular machinery responsible for transfer of materials among compartments within cells. In so doing, Rothman 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, was as fundamental for physiology as it was central for cell biology, since alterations in these pathways are important in cancer, diabetes, and diseases of the central nervous system, and membrane fusion is currently the target for the next generation of drugs to control AIDS. His current research is on the biophysics and physiologic regulation of membrane fusion, to which he is applying high-throughput genome-based approaches at the cellular level.
Dr. Rothman has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of this work, including the King Faisal International Prize for Science (1996), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1996), the Lounsbery Award of the National Academy of Sciences (1997), the Heineken Foundation Prize of the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (2000), the Louisa Gross Horwitz prize of Columbia University (2002), and the Lasker Basic Science Award (2002). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993) and its Institute of Medicine (1995), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994).
Dr. Rothman has served extensively in industry. Currently, he is the Senior Scientific Advisor for Biomedical Research at GE’s Global Research Center, and from 2003-2007 was the Chief Scientist of GE’s Healthcare division and its predecessor company Amersham plc. He has served on the Scientific Advisory Boards of Johnson & Johnson, Amersham, ARIAD Pharmaceuticals, and Merck, and was a consultant to the chairman of R&D at Merck, Genentech, Biogen, and GSK. He founded Mojave Therapeutics and was a co-founder of ARIAD Pharmaceuticals. He is a Director of Introgen and MDRNA and serves on its science advisory board, and is a consultant to Eli Lilly.