Richard Scheller
Richard H. Scheller ( born October 30, 1953 in Milwaukee ) is an American biochemist and neuroscientist.
Life and work
Scheller studied at the University of Wisconsin (Bachelor in Biochemistry 1975) and in 1980 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ) a doctorate in chemistry. As a post - graduate student, he was in 1980/81 at Caltech and 1981/82 at Columbia University in the later Nobel laureates Eric Kandel and Richard Axel, where he turned to neuroscience research. In 1982 he became assistant professor, associate professor in 1987 and 1994, professor of molecular and cellular physiology and biology at Stanford University. He also conducted research from 1994 for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute ( HHMI ) at the Stanford University Medical Center. Since 2001 he has been at Genentech, first as senior vice president and from 2003 as Executive Vice President, responsible for research strategy, discovery of new drugs and their early (clinical ) tests. In 2008 he became Chief Scientific Officer. He is also in the extended Board ( Executive Committee ) of the parent company Roche and the Research Review Committee of Genentech.
Since 2004, he is next to his leadership position at Genentech also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco.
Scheller turned as a post- doctoral fellow with Kandel and Axel at Columbia University neuroscience - even though he was to actually previously hardly trained. He used genetic methods for identifying the signaling molecules of the nervous system ( neuropeptides ) responsible genes and identified and cloned genes for proteins that control the release of neurotransmitters. At Genentech, he explored mainly proteins that control the transport of structures in cells (Rab GTPases ).
He has published over 200 scientific papers ( 2011).
In 2010 he received with Thomas C. Südhof and James E. Rothman the Kavli Prize in neuroscience that he showed how networks of nerve cells in the spinal cord of mammals generate elementary rhythmic motor movements. In 1997 he received the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology and 1993 he held the W. Alden Spencer Lecture ( with Thomas Südhof ).
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2000) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1998). He is the Council for Mental Health ( National Advisory Mental Health Council ) of the National Institutes of Health. In 2009 he received the Distinguished Alumni Award in Biology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. In 2013 he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research.