Professor, Department of Biological Chemistry,
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Larry Zipursky studies the molecular mechanisms by which neurons make highly specific patterns of connections, called synapses, during development. Understanding how synapses are specified is a problem of daunting complexity in the human brain. Even in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which his lab studies, there are 250,000 neurons and millions of synaptic connections. How do correct connections form during development? Presumably specific molecular labels on the surface of different neurons provide a basis for the cellular recognition that underlies this specificity. Identifying these labels and understanding how they work is the central goal of Dr. Zipursky's research.
He received his Ph.D. degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he studied mechanisms of DNA replication in bacteria in the laboratory of Jerard Hurwitz. He moved to the California Institute of Technology to pursue postdoctoral studies in Drosophila neurogenetics with Seymour Benzer and then joined the UCLA faculty. He became an Associate Investigator of the HHMI in 1991, and an HHMI Investigator in 1994. He has held his current position as Professor in UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine since July 1993, and he is also a member of the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. Dr. Zipursky was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has served on the editorial boards of several high profile scientific journals, and has organized numerous scientific conferences. He has sat on scientific advisory boards for the Hereditary Disease Foundation and the Helen Hay Whitney Foundataion, and review panels for the Searle, Sloan and McKnight Scholars Programs, the Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral awards committee, two NIH Study Sections, and Visiting Committees for the Division of Biology at Caltech and the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at UCSF.