About the Speakers

Professor Ian R Gibbons* was born in 1931 in Hastings, Sussex, UK and is currently Visiting Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He obtained his BA in Physics in 1954 and his PhD in 1957 from the University of Cambridge, UK. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA (1957–1958). He then worked at Harvard University, USA (1958–1967), where he was successively Research Fellow, Lecturer and Assistant Professor in the Biology Department. He was an Associate Professor (1967–1969) and Professor of Biophysics (1969–1997) in the Pacific Biomedical Research Center, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, USA. He retired from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu in 1997 and moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been working ever since as a Research Scientist (1997–2009) and then a Visiting Researcher (2009–). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

* A recorded video interview with Professor Ian R Gibbons on his award-winning discovery will be shown during the Lecture.


Professor Ronald D Vale was born in 1959 in Hollywood, California, USA and is currently Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), USA. He obtained his BA in Biology and Chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA in 1980 and received his PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, USA in 1985. He was a Staff Fellow at the Laboratory of Neurobiology, National Institutes of Health, and at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole (1985–1986). He then joined UCSF, where he was successively Assistant Professor (1986–1992), Associate Professor (1992–1994) and Full Professor (1994–). In 1999, he was appointed an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He served as the Director of the Cell Biology Program (2000–2003) and Chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology (2004–2010) at UCSF. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Enquiry

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