Tobias C. Walther is the chair of the cell biology program at Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City and a professor at Weill Cornell School of Medicine, where he co-directs the Farese and Walther lab. He has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2015. [1] His primary responsibilities are to provide leadership in research and teaching in the scientific fields of metabolism, membrane biology and lipids. [2]
Walther's laboratory research seeks to understand the mechanisms that regulate lipid metabolism, lipid storage, and lipid function in membranes or as signaling molecules. [3] Walther's research is focused on the mechanisms by which cells regulate their lipid content and the impact of intracellular lipids on cellular functioning. [4] The laboratory also investigates lipid metabolism in human pathologies, such as cancer and neurodegenerative disease.
Walther was an associate professor of cell biology at the Yale School of Medicine. [5] While at Yale, Walther positioned his laboratory at the forefront of the rapidly growing field of lipid droplet biology. [6] [7] His group extensively studied proteins required to adjust lipid droplet size and composition according to the cellular state. Additionally, his research focused on organelle biogenesis and membrane biology. At Yale, Walther also oversaw the High Throughput Cell Biology Center at Yale's West Campus. Moving to Harvard, Walther is working in a scientific partnership with Robert V. Farese, Jr., on the biochemistry, cell biology, and genetics of lipid metabolism and homeostasis. For their research, Farese and Walther have been using a variety of state-of-the systems biology approaches, such as mass spectrometry-based proteomics and high-content screening.Á
From 2014 to 2022, Walther was a professor at Harvard and the Executive Director of the Harvard Chan School Analytics Center and Director of the Harvard Chan Research Center on Causes and Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease .
Walther was selected as an American Society for Cell Biology Fellow in 2020. [8] He also is the recipient of the 2021 ASBMB-Merck Award for outstanding contributions in biochemistry and molecular biology (together with Robert Farese, Jr.) 2022 ASBMB awards
Walther received his PhD in biology from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 2002. Walther then joined the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, to complete his postdoctoral studies. After completion of his postdoctoral training, Walther became group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. In 2010, Walther relocated his lab from Germany to the United States and was appointed as an associate professor of Cell Biology at the Yale School of Medicine, and in 2014 to Harvard Cell Biology and Harvard Molecular Metabolism.
John Kuriyan is the dean of basic sciences and a professor of biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He was formerly the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of molecular and cell biology (MCB) and chemistry, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's physical biosciences division, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and he has also been on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009, 2019 and 2020.
Barbara J. Meyer is a biologist and genetist, noted for her pioneering research on lambda phage, a virus that infects bacteria; discovery of the master control gene involved in sex determination; and studies of gene regulation, particularly dosage compensation. Meyer's work has revealed mechanisms of sex determination and dosage compensation—that balance X-chromosome gene expression between the sexes in Caenorhabditis elegans that continue to serve as the foundation of diverse areas of study on chromosome structure and function today.
Pietro De Camilli NAS, AAA&S, NAM is an Italian-American biologist and John Klingenstein Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine. He is also an Investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. De Camilli completed his M.D. degree from the University of Milan in Italy in 1972. He then went to the United States and did his postdoctoral studies at Yale University with Paul Greengard.
Avery August is a Belizean-born American scientist who is currently a professor of immunology and vice provost at Cornell University.
Utpal Banerjee is a distinguished professor of the department of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University, India and obtained his Master of Science degree in physical chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. In 1984, he obtained a PhD in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology where he was also a postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Seymour Benzer from 1984-1988.
Lipid droplets, also referred to as lipid bodies, oil bodies or adiposomes, are lipid-rich cellular organelles that regulate the storage and hydrolysis of neutral lipids and are found largely in the adipose tissue. They also serve as a reservoir for cholesterol and acyl-glycerols for membrane formation and maintenance. Lipid droplets are found in all eukaryotic organisms and store a large portion of lipids in mammalian adipocytes. Initially, these lipid droplets were considered to merely serve as fat depots, but since the discovery in the 1990s of proteins in the lipid droplet coat that regulate lipid droplet dynamics and lipid metabolism, lipid droplets are seen as highly dynamic organelles that play a very important role in the regulation of intracellular lipid storage and lipid metabolism. The role of lipid droplets outside of lipid and cholesterol storage has recently begun to be elucidated and includes a close association to inflammatory responses through the synthesis and metabolism of eicosanoids and to metabolic disorders such as obesity, cancer, and atherosclerosis. In non-adipocytes, lipid droplets are known to play a role in protection from lipotoxicity by storage of fatty acids in the form of neutral triacylglycerol, which consists of three fatty acids bound to glycerol. Alternatively, fatty acids can be converted to lipid intermediates like diacylglycerol (DAG), ceramides and fatty acyl-CoAs. These lipid intermediates can impair insulin signaling, which is referred to as lipid-induced insulin resistance and lipotoxicity. Lipid droplets also serve as platforms for protein binding and degradation. Finally, lipid droplets are known to be exploited by pathogens such as the hepatitis C virus, the dengue virus and Chlamydia trachomatis among others.
Jennifer Lea Stow is deputy director (research), NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and head of the Protein Trafficking and Inflammation laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), The University of Queensland, Australia. She received a PhD from Monash University in Melbourne in 1982., postdoctoral training at Yale University School of Medicine (US) in the Department of Cell Biologyand first faculty position as an assistant professor at Harvard University in the Renal Unit, Departments of Medicine and Pathology at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Volker Haucke is a biochemist and cell biologist. He is Director of the Leibniz-Forschungsinstitut für Molekulare Pharmakologie Berlin (FMP) Berlin and Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at the Institute for Pharmacy of the Free University of Berlin.
Mark Andrew Lemmon an English-born biochemist, is the Alfred Gilman Professor and Department Chair of Pharmacology at Yale University where he also directs the Cancer Biology Institute.
Kai Simons is a Finnish professor of biochemistry and cell biology and physician, living and working in Germany. He introduced the concept of lipid rafts, and coined the term trans-Golgi network. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and European Molecular Biology Organization, and initiated the foundation of Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.
Gökhan S. Hotamisligil is a Turkish-American physician scientist; James Stevens Simmons Chair of Genetics and Metabolism at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH); Director of the Sabri Ülker Center for Metabolic Research and associate member of Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the Joslin Diabetes Center.
Catherine (Cathy) Drennan is an American biochemist and crystallographer. She is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biochemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Marion Sewer (1972-2016) was a pharmacologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego's Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences known for her research on steroid hormone biogenesis and her commitment to increasing diversity in science. Much of her research centered around cytochrome P450, a family of enzymes involved in the conversion of cholesterol into steroid hormones. She died unexpectedly at the age of 43 from a pulmonary embolism on January 28, 2016, while traveling through the Detroit airport.
Steven J. Fliesler is a distinguished American biochemist and researcher renowned for his contributions to the field of ophthalmology. He currently holds the title of SUNY Distinguished Professor and serves as the Meyer H. Riwchun Endowed Chair Professor of Ophthalmology at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (SUNY). Additionally, he also serves as the Vice-Chair for Research in the Department of Ophthalmology and acts as the Director of the Ira G. Ross Eye Institute Vision Research Center at the Buffalo VA Medical Center, VA Western NY Healthcare System (VAWNYHS), in Buffalo, NY.
Jean Elise Schaffer is an American physician-scientist. She is a Senior Investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center, where she also serves as Associate Research Director, and she is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her work focuses on fundamental mechanisms of metabolic stress responses and the pathophysiology of diabetes complications.
Alexandra C. Newton is a Canadian and American biochemist. She is a Distinguished Professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Newton runs a multidisciplinary Protein kinase C and Cell signaling biochemistry and cell biology research group in the School of Medicine, investigating molecular mechanisms of signal transduction in the Phospholipase C (PLC) and Phosphoinositide 3-kinase signaling pathways. She has been continuously funded by the US National Institutes of Health since 1988.
Yusuf Awni Hannun is an American molecular biologist, biochemist, and clinician. He is known for the discovery that sphingolipids have signaling functions.
Robert V. Farese, Jr., is an American physician-scientist and professor of Cell Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute of Memorial Sloan Kettering. He is an internationally recognized leader in the study of cellular lipid metabolism and has made seminal contributions to our understanding of energy storage as triglycerides in cellular organelles called lipid droplets.
Christoph Benning is a German–American plant biologist. He is an MSU Foundation Professor and University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University. Benning's research into lipid metabolism in plants, algae and photosynthetic bacteria, led him to be named Editor-in-Chief of The Plant Journal in October 2008.
Peter Tontonoz is a physician-scientist and academic. He is the Frances and Albert Piansky Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and of Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles.