The 2021 Nobel Prize Laureates in Physiology or Medicine
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch."
David Julius was born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School. He earned his undergraduate degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. He attained his doctorate from University of California, Berkeley in 1984, under joint supervision of Jeremy Thorner and Randy Schekman, where he identified Kex2 as the founding member of furin-like proprotein convertases. In 1989, he completed his post-doctoral training with Richard Axel at Columbia University where he cloned and characterized the serotonin 1c receptor.
Ardem Patapoutian was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1967. He attended Demirdjian and Hovagimian, two Armenian schools in Beirut. He enrolled at the American University of Beirut for a year before emigrating to the United States in 1986 and became a U.S. citizen. He received a B.S. degree in cell and developmental biology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and a Ph.D. degree in biology from the California Institute of Technology in 1996 under direction of Barbara Wold. As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked with Louis F. Reichardt at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2000, he became an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute. Between 2000 and 2014, he had an additional research position for the Novartis Research Foundation. Since 2014, he has been an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).
*****
