James Rothman ’67

Dr. Rothman is one of the world’s most distinguished biochemists and cell biologists. In 2013, he was awarded The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to the key molecular machinery responsible for the transfer of materials among compartments within cells, providing the conceptual framework for understanding such diverse and important processes as the release of insulin into the blood, communication between nerve cells in the brain, and the entry of viruses to infect cells.

Rothman is chairman of the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Cell Biology and is the director and founder of the Nanobiology Institute. He graduated from Yale College with a BA in physics and received his PhD in biological chemistry from Harvard. He was a student at Harvard Medical School, where he completed a fellowship in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Prior to teaching at Yale, Rothman was a professor at Stanford University, Princeton University, and Columbia University. He also founded and chaired the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.