Biographical sketch

Dr. Schekman was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”.

Randy Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He received a BA in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1971. He received a PhD in Biochemistry in 1975 from Stanford University.

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.

Since 1991, Schekman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, at the Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, in the 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.

Among his academic achievements, these are the most important:

• Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 together with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof.
• Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, which he shared with James Rothman in 2002.
• Eli Lilly Research Award in Microbiology and Immunology in 1987.
• Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research in 1994.
• Canada Gairdner International Award in 1996.
• Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 2002.