David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He also served as the director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, which joined Caltech and UCLA in a program to translate basic scientific discoveries into clinical realities. He also formerly served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, founder and director of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 1982 to 1990, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
William French Anderson is an American physician, geneticist and molecular biologist. He is known as the "father of gene therapy". He graduated from Harvard College in 1958, Trinity College, Cambridge University (England) in 1960, and from Harvard Medical School in 1963. In 1990 he was the first person to succeed in carrying out gene therapy by treating a 4-year-old girl suffering from severe combined immunodeficiency. In 2006, he was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor and in 2007 was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was paroled on May 17, 2018, for good behavior.
The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) was created in 2004 after 59% of California voters approved California Proposition 71: the Research and Cures Initiative, which allocated $3 billion to fund stem cell research in California.
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. 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. 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.
Mario Ramberg Capecchi is an Italian-born molecular geneticist and a co-awardee of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice. He shared the prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
Tom Maniatis, is an American professor of molecular and cellular biology. He is a professor at Columbia University, and serves as the Scientific Director and CEO of the New York Genome Center.
The University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine—known as the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA (DGSOM)—is an accredited medical school located in Los Angeles, California, United States. The school was renamed in 2001 in honor of media mogul David Geffen who donated $200 million in unrestricted funds. Founded in 1951, it is the second medical school in the University of California system, after the UCSF School of Medicine.
Louis J. Ignarro is an American pharmacologist. For demonstrating the signaling properties of nitric oxide, he was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert F. Furchgott and Ferid Murad.
Gene David Block is an American biologist, academic, inventor, and chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles. Block has served as provost and professor of biology at the University of Virginia. While at the University of Virginia, Block interacted with Randy Pausch and is mentioned in his memoir, The Last Lecture.
The UCLA College of Letters and Science is the arts and sciences college of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It encompasses the Life and Physical Sciences, Humanities, Social Sciences, Honors Program and other programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. It is often called UCLA College or the College, which is not ambiguous because the College is the only educational unit at UCLA to be currently denominated as a "college." All other educational units at UCLA are currently labeled as schools or institutes.
Robert Peter Gale is an American physician and medical researcher. He is known for research in leukemia and other bone marrow disorders.
Leonard H. Rome is a cell biologist and biochemist who has been a faculty member of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, since he joined the Department of Biological Chemistry there, in 1979. He became a full professor in 1988 and has also served as the Senior Associate Dean for Research in the Geffen School of Medicine from 1997 to 2012. He is the Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) since 2004, and was Interim Director from 2007-2009. In addition, he served from 2001 to 2005 as University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Associate Vice Chancellor for Research for the Life and Health Sciences.
James A. Lake is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology and of Human Genetics at UCLA. Lake is best known for the New Animal Phylogeny and for the first three-dimensional structure of the ribosome. He has also made significant contributions to understanding genome evolution across all kingdoms of life, including discovering informational and operational genes, elucidating the complexity hypothesis for gene transfer, rooting the tree of life, and understanding the early transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic life.
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte is a Spanish biochemist and developmental biologist. He is a professor in the Gene Expression Laboratories at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California since 1993.
Inder Mohan Verma is an Indian American molecular biologist, the former Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego. He is recognized for seminal discoveries in the fields of cancer, immunology, and gene therapy.
James S. Economou is an American physician-scientist on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he is also a surgical oncologist and tumor immunologist. He was Vice Chancellor for Research at UCLA (2010-2015) where he promoted academic entrepreneurship, transdisciplinary research, and support of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The UCLA research enterprise generates almost one billion dollars in extramural funds annually.
No-Hee Park is a distinguished professor of dentistry and dean emeritus at the School of Dentistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also a researcher and scientist in the field of oral and craniofacial research. He has more than 170 scientific publications, nine invited review articles, nine book chapters and 180 abstracts for national and international scientific presentations.
Tracy L. Johnson is the Keith and Cecilia Terasaki Presidential Endowed Chair in the Life Sciences and Professor of Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In May 2020, she was named Dean of the UCLA Division of Life Sciences.
Carl H. June is an American immunologist and oncologist. He is currently the Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He is most well known for his research into T cell therapies for the treatment of cancer. In 2020 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Sabeeha Sabanali Merchant is a professor of plant biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the photosynthetic metabolism and metalloenzymes In 2010 Merchant led the team that sequenced the Chlamydomonas genome. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
