William T. Wickner

William T. Wickner (born March 13, 1946), the James C. Chilcott '20 Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at Dartmouth Medical School, is an authority on membrane fusion and inheritance, which is a fundamental problem in eukaryotic and bacterial cell biology.^[1]

Education

Bill Wickner, brother of prion biologist Reed Wickner and Cornell graduate Nancy Wickner Kogan, is a 1967 graduate of Yale University (chemistry) and a 1973 M.D. graduate of Harvard Medical School. At Harvard, he worked with Eugene P. Kennedy.

Career and research

He conducted post-doctoral research with Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University, discovering the role of an RNA primer in the replication of DNA. He began his independent research career as a Mellon senior fellow at Stanford in 1974, where he initiated studies of asymmetric membrane assembly in bacteria and viral assembly.

Wickner then spent 17 years on the faculty of UCLA, during which time he earned honors including an American Cancer Society Faculty Research Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NIH MERIT Award.

In 1993, he moved to Dartmouth Medical School, where he became chair of the Biochemistry Department.

Wickner has trained many successful scientists including Barbara Conradt, Elliott Crooke, Franz-Ulrich Hartl, Daniel Klionsky, Roland Lill, Gail Mandel, Janet Shaw, Pamela Silver, Gunnar von Heijne and Lois Weisman.

Wickner's Lab currently explores yeast vacuole fusion as a model for membrane fusion.

Awards and honors

Wickner wad elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. Wickner is also a foreign associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

References