David E. Clapham
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
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Primary Section: 24, Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience Secondary Section: 23, Physiology and Pharmacology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2006)
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Biosketch
David E. Clapham, M.D., Ph.D., is currently V.P. and C.S.O. of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is the Aldo R. Castañeda Professor (emeritus) of Cardiovascular Research at Boston Children’s Hospital, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and an elected member of NAS and AAAS. He earned his Electrical Engineering degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his M.D. and Ph.D. from Emory University School of Medicine. He completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Clapham was a senior Fulbright Fellow during his postdoctoral training with Erwin Neher at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Clapham established his independent research laboratory at Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School in 1985, moving to Mayo Clinic in 1987, and returning to HMS at Boston Children's Hospital in 1997.
Research Interests
Dr. Clapham's major research interest is the signal transduction control of ion channels. This encompasses identification of genes encoding novel ion channels, proteins interacting with these channels, and elucidation of their functions in organelles and the plasma membrane. These studies have included ion channels of mitochondria, lysosomes, ER/nuclear membrane, and cilia as well as many channels on the plasma membranes of diverse tissue from excitable tissues such as brain and heart to spermatozoa.
