William T. Wickner (born March 13, 1946), is an authority on membrane fusion, a fundamental process in all eukaryotic cells.
l Wickner home page at Dartmouth College

Education

Bill Wickner, brother of prion biologist

Reed Wickner Reed B. Wickner (born c. 1942) is an American yeast geneticist. In 1994 he proposed that the 'PSI''+and RE3phenotypes in ''Saccharomyces cerevisiae'', a form of budding yeast, were caused by prion forms of native proteins - specifically, the Su ...

and Cornell graduate Nancy Wickner Kogan, is a 1967 graduate of

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

(chemistry) and a 1973 M.D. graduate of

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

. At Harvard, he worked with

Eugene P. Kennedy Eugene Patrick Kennedy (1919–2011) was an American biochemist known for his work on lipid metabolism and membrane function. He attended DePaul University and then became a PhD student at the University of Chicago. From 1959 to 1993 he worked at ...

Career and research

He conducted

post-doctoral research A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...

with

Arthur Kornberg Arthur Kornberg (March 3, 1918 – October 26, 2007) was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for the discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of ribonucleic acid and deoxyribonucleic aci ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, co-discovering the role of an RNA primer in the replication of DNA. He began his independent research career as a Mellon senior fellow at Stanford in 1974, where he initiated studies of asymmetric membrane assembly in bacteria. Wickner then spent 17 years on the faculty of

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

, during which time he earned honors including an

American Cancer Society The American Cancer Society (ACS) is a nationwide voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer. Established in 1913, the society is organized into six geographical regions of both medical and lay volunteers operating in more than ...

Faculty Research Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an

NIH MERIT Award The NIH MERIT award (Method To Extend Research in Time) Award (R37) was created by the National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary age ...

. In 1993, he moved to

Dartmouth Medical School The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth is the graduate medical school of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The fourth oldest medical school in the United States, it was founded in 1797 by New England physician Nathan Smith. It is o ...

, where he became chair of the biochemistry department. Wickner has trained many successful scientists including

Franz-Ulrich Hartl Franz-Ulrich Hartl (born 10 March 1957) is a German biochemist and Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in the field of protein-mediated protein folding and is a recipient of the 2011 ...

, Gail Mandel,

Pamela Silver Pamela A. Silver is an American cell and systems biologist and a bioengineer. She holds the Elliot T. and Onie H. Adams Professorship of Biochemistry and Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Systems Biology. Silver is ...

Gunnar von Heijne Professor Nils ''Gunnar'' Hansson von Heijne, born 10 June 1951 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish scientist working on signal peptides, membrane proteins and bioinformatics at the Stockholm Center for Biomembrane Research at Stockholm University. Educa ...

. Wickner's Lab currently explores yeast vacuole fusion as a model for membrane fusion.

Awards and honors

Wickner was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

in 1996. In 2017, he received the

William C. Rose Award The William C. Rose Award given by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology recognizes outstanding contributions to biochemical and molecular biological research and a demonstrated commitment to the training of younger scientists ...

of the ASBMB. Wickner is also a foreign associate of the

European Molecular Biology Organization The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) is a professional, non-profit organization of more than 1,800 life scientists. Its goal is to promote research in life science and enable international exchange between scientists. It co-funds cour ...

and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wickner, William T. Living people 1946 births American biochemists Yale College alumni Harvard Medical School alumni Stanford University alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty Geisel School of Medicine faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences