Roeland "Roel" Nusse (born 9 June 1950,

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

) is a professor at Stanford University and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research was seminal in the discovery of

Wnt signaling The Wnt signaling pathways are a group of signal transduction pathways which begin with proteins that pass signals into a cell through cell surface receptors. The name Wnt is a portmanteau created from the names Wingless and Int-1. Wnt signaling ...

, a family of pleiotropic regulators involved in development and disease.

Research

Nusse received his BSc in biology and his PhD from the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being ...

. Nusse did a postdoctoral fellowship under the guidance of

Harold Varmus Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He was ...

at the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...

. In 1982, Nusse and Varmus discovered the

Wnt1 Proto-oncogene Wnt-1, or Proto-oncogene Int-1 homolog is a protein that in humans is encoded by the () gene. The WNT gene family consists of structurally related genes that encode secreted signaling proteins. These proteins have been implicated ...

gene. After his postdoctoral fellowship, Nusse joined the Netherlands Cancer Institute expanding on the earlier work on the Wnt pathway and identifying the pathway in fruit flies. In 1990, he joined the department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University. His lab is currently focused on the role of Wnt in stem cell development and tissue repair.

Awards

Nusse received the

Peter Debye Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry. Biography Early life Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, D ...

Prize from the

University of Maastricht Maastricht University (abbreviated as UM; nl, Universiteit Maastricht) is a public research university in Maastricht, Netherlands. Founded in 1976, it is the second youngest of the thirteen Dutch universities. In 2021, 22,383 students studied at ...

in 2000. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences,

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 the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1997). He is a fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

. He won a

Breakthrough Prize The Breakthrough Prizes are a set of international awards bestowed in three categories by the Breakthrough Prize Board in recognition of scientific advances. The awards are part of several "Breakthrough" initiatives founded and funded by Yuri Mi ...

in 2017. In 2020 he received the

Canada Gairdner International Award The Canada Gairdner International Award is given annually by the Gairdner Foundation at a special dinner to five individuals for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science. Receipt of the Gairdner is traditionally considered a p ...

References

External links

Roeland Nusse Lab at Stanford University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Nusse, Roel 1950 births Living people Developmental biologists Dutch biologists Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Dutch molecular biologists Scientists from Amsterdam Stanford University School of Medicine faculty University of Amsterdam alumni Academic staff of the University of Amsterdam University of California, San Francisco alumni