James E. Rothman

Did You Know?

• Rothman earned his high school diploma from Pomfret School in 1967.
• He received a B.A. in physics from Yale University in 1971.
• His Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Harvard in 1976 was completed under the supervision of Eugene Patrick Kennedy.

Career and research

After earning his Ph.D., James E. Rothman worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT under Harvey Lodish, studying how membrane proteins get glycosylated. In 1978, he joined Stanford University’s biochemistry department. He spent 1988 to 1991 at Princeton University before moving to New York to establish the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he also became vice-chairman of the Sloan-Kettering Institute. In 2003, he left Sloan-Kettering to become a physiology professor at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and to head Columbia’s Center for Chemical Biology. He moved to Yale in 2008, while keeping a part-time role at Columbia. Since 2013, he has also been a Distinguished Professor-in-Residence at the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Studies of ShanghaiTech University. In 1995, Rothman joined the scientific advisory board of Amersham plc; after GE Healthcare bought Amersham in 2003, he became its Chief Science Advisor. Rothman’s work revealed how vesicles—small sacs that carry hormones, growth factors, and other molecules inside cells—find the right destinations and release their cargo at the proper times. This cellular trafficking is essential for cell division, nerve cell communication, insulin and hormone secretion, and nutrient uptake. When this process goes wrong, it can lead to conditions like diabetes and botulism. Former postdoctoral students in his lab include Gero Miesenböck and Suzanne Pfeffer. In 2010, Rothman shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with Richard Scheller and Thomas C. Südhof for uncovering the molecular basis of neurotransmitter release. He received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Randy Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof for their discoveries about the machinery that controls vesicle traffic. Rothman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Medicine.