Randy Wayne Schekman

Dr. 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 (Chevy Chase, Maryland). He studied the enzymology of DNA replication as a graduate student with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University. His current interest in cellular membranes developed during a postdoctoral period with S. J. Singer at the University of California, San Diego. Among his awards are the Gairdner International Award, the Albert Lasker Award in Basic Medical Research, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with James Rothman and Thomas Südhof. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, a Foreign Associate of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a Foreign Associate of the Royal Society of London and an Honorary Academician of the Academia Sinica. In 1999, he was elected president of the American Society for Cell Biology. Dr. Schekman served as editor-in-chief of the Annual Reviews of Cell and Developmental Biology (2002-2017), editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the NAS (2006-2011), and in 2011 he founded and until 2019 served as editor-in-chief of the open-access journal eLife, sponsored by the HHMI, Wellcome Trust and the Max Planck Society.

Beginning in 2019, he became the scientific director of ASAParkinson’s, an effort supported by the Sergey Brin Family Foundation to identify and support basic research on the mechanisms of Parkinson’s Disease initiation and progression. Dr. Schekman’s laboratory investigates the mechanism of membrane protein traffic in the secretory pathway in eukaryotic cells. Currently, the lab investigates the mechanism of biogenesis of extracellular vesicles including how small RNAs are sorted for secretion in exosomes and the means by which these vesicles are internalized and function in target cells.