Richard Vallee

Richard Vallee is at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. He received his BA degree from Swarthmore College, where he first majored in chemistry and then biology. In his last semester he was introduced to the new field of cell biology and the then recently identified structures called microtubules. He did his PhD at Yale in protein biophysics, and then began work on microtubules and their associated proteins as a postdoc in the laboratory of Gary Borisy. Subsequently, his own lab was responsible for the discovery of the motor protein cytoplasmic dynein and the endocytic GTPase dynamin, each of which has proven to play a central role in substantial aspects of cell biology.