William Albert Catterall (born 12 October 1946 in

Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts ...

) is an American

pharmacologist Pharmacology is a branch of medicine, biology and pharmaceutical sciences concerned with drug or medication action, where a drug may be defined as any artificial, natural, or endogenous (from within the body) molecule which exerts a biochemic ...

and neurobiologist, who researches ion channels. He currently serves as a professor of pharmacology at the

University of Washington School of Medicine The University of Washington School of Medicine (UWSOM) is a large public medical school in the northwest United States, located in Seattle and affiliated with the University of Washington. According to ''U.S. News & World Report''s 2022 Best Grad ...

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest region ...

and is known for the discovery of the sodium and calcium voltage-gated ion channels. Catterall received his B.A. in chemistry from Brown University in 1968 and his Ph.D. in physiological chemistry from

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM) is the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1893, the School of Medicine shares a campus with the Johns Hopkins Hospi ...

in 1972. He did his postdoctoral training in neurobiology and molecular pharmacology as a Muscular Dystrophy Association Fellow with

Marshall Nirenberg Marshall Warren Nirenberg (April 10, 1927 – January 15, 2010) was an American biochemist and geneticist. He shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 with Har Gobind Khorana and Robert W. Holley for "breaking the genetic code" ...

at the

NIH The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

from 1972 to 1974. After three years as a staff scientist at the NIH, Catterall joined the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattl ...

in 1977 as an associate professor of pharmacology. He earned full professorship in 1981 and served as chair of the University of Washington's pharmacology department from 1984 to 2016.

Honors and awards

Catterall has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2010. In 2003, he received the 16th annual

Bristol-Myers Squibb Award Between 1977 and 2006, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation presented annual awards of US$50,000 to scientists for distinguished achievements in fields such as cancer, infectious disease, neuroscience, nutrition, and cardiovascular disease. The rec ...

for Distinguished Achievement in Neuroscience Research, in recognition of his pioneering research into sodium and calcium channel proteins. In 2008, he was elected a

Foreign Member of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematic ...

. Catterall was awarded the Canada International Gairdner Award in 2010. * I. & H. Wachter Award, I. & H. Wachter Foundation (2010) * Bard Lecture, Johns Hopkins University (2010)

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Catterall, William Albert 1946 births American neuroscientists American pharmacologists University of Washington faculty Living people Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Foreign Members of the Royal Society Fellows of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics Johns Hopkins School of Medicine alumni Brown University alumni Members of the National Academy of Medicine