Fred Chang

Fred grew up in California and studied biology and played the violin at Princeton as an undergraduate. He obtained an M.D. Ph.D. at UCSF, studying under the wise tutelage of the late Ira Herskowitz. As a graduate student, he played with budding yeast ‘shmoos’ and studied how yeast pheromones arrest the cell cycle. He then went to do postdoctoral stints with Paul Nurse in Oxford and London, and David Drubin at UC Berkeley. In his postdoc, he started studies of cytokinesis in fission yeast and identified one of the first formins, cdc12. He started his independent position in 1997 at Columbia University Medical Center, where his lab currently studies aspects of cellular morphogenesis in fission yeast, focusing on cytokinesis, cell polarity and the cytoskeleton. He continues to enjoy playing with cells and has developed ways of physically manipulating yeast cells, for instance using laser microsurgery, cell centrifugation and changing their shape by squashing them into tiny molds.