Meet Randy Schekman - PhD

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 leads ASAP (Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s), a coordinated research initiative to advance targeted basic research for Parkinson’s disease. From 2011 – 2019 he was the editor of eLife, a high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. 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 for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking. Since 1991, Dr. Schekman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Division of Cell and Developmental 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. Dr. Schekman joined the Berkeley faculty as a member of the Biochemistry Department in 1976. He holds a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University.