Jeremy W. Thorner
University of California, Berkeley
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Primary Section: 21, Biochemistry Secondary Section: 22, Cellular and Developmental Biology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2015)
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Biosketch
Jeremy Thorner is a biochemist and cell biologist recognized for his contributions to our understanding of biological signal transduction mechanisms. Born, raised, and educated in public schools in Quincy, MA, he received his A.B. magna cum laude (Biochemical Sciences) from Harvard College (1967) and his PhD (Biochemistry) under Henry Paulus from Harvard University (1972). He was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow (1972-74) under I. Robert Lehman in the Biochemistry Department at Stanford University School of Medicine. Appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974, he is now Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and, for twenty years (1991-2011), held the William V. Power Chair in Biology. He has received many accolades for his research and teaching, including a ten-year MERIT Award (1989-1998) from NIGMS, the Dean's Award for Distinguished Research Mentoring of Undergraduates in the College of Letters and Science at Berkeley (2004), election as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998), Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (1998), Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2015) and the Herbert Tabor Research Award (2019) from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Research Interests
Transmembrane and intracellular signal transduction mechanisms have been the main focus of our group, especially understanding how extracellular stimuli control cell growth and division, cell morphology, and gene expression at the biochemical level. Although I have retired from active faculty service (as of 1 July 2020), I will continue to teach (one last time) in academic year 2020-21 and my lab will continue to operate until 30 June 2021 or so, when it will close down permanently. At the present time, we continue to focus most of our remaining research effort on protein kinases that control plasma membrane lipid and protein homeostasis. Previous research projects that, in some cases, are also on-going in collaboration with former graduate students or former postdoctoral fellows, or with collaborators on this campus or elsewhere, include: molecular genetics and biochemistry of MAPK cascades; the roles of septins and septin-associated protein kinases in cell morphogenesis and cell cycle control; and. the molecular biology of phosphoinositide-dependent signaling.
