Randy Schekman

Dr Randy Schekman is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

As a graduate student at Stanford University, he studied the enzymology of DNA replication with Arthur Kornberg. His current interest in cellular membranes developed during a postdoctoral period with S. J. Singer at the University of California, San Diego. When he joined the faculty at Berkeley, he developed a genetic and biochemical approach to the study of eukaryotic membrane traffic, which reveals how proteins enter and move between membrane-bound compartments of cells.

Among the honours he has earned is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 – which he shared with James Rothman of Yale University and Thomas Südhof of Stanford University – for their discoveries of the mechanism regulating vesicle traffic, a major cellular transport system.

In 1999, he was elected President of the American Society for Cell Biology. In 2002 he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Annual Reviews of Cell and Developmental Biology. From 2006 – 2011, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2011, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal, eLife, sponsored by the HHMI, The Wellcome Trust/UK and the Max Planck Society. Earlier in 2015, Dr Schekman was appointed by the Board of Regents as a system-wide University Professor at the Berkeley campus.

The student model Bausch & Lomb microscope that he bought from money earned from odd jobs as a junior high school student now resides in the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.