James E. Rothman, Ph.D.

Dr. Rothman is chair of Yale School of Medicine's Department of Cell Biology. Previously, he was the Clyde and Helen Wu Professor of Chemical Biology and Director of Columbia University’s Judith P. Sulzberger, MD Genome Center. He is renowned for discovering the molecular machinery responsible for transfer of materials among compartments within cells.

Dr. Rothman has received numerous awards and honors in recognition of this work, including the King Faisal International Prize for Science (1996), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1996), the Lounsbery Award of the National Academy of Sciences (1997), the Heineken Foundation Prize of the Netherlands Academy of Sciences (2000), the Louisa Gross Horwitz prize of Columbia University (2002), and the Lasker Award (2002). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993) and its Institute of Medicine (1995), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994).

Dr. Rothman received his Ph.D. degree in biological chemistry from Harvard Medical School in 1976. He also attended Harvard Medical School from 1971 to 1973. From 1976 to 1978, he completed a fellowship in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1978 to 1988, he was a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University. Dr. Rothman was the E.R. Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University (1988-1991). Prior to coming to Columbia in 2004, Dr. Rothman founded and chaired the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center which he joined in 1991 as the Paul Marks Chair and where he also served as Vice-Chairman of Sloan-Kettering.