David Julius
Professor and Chair, Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco,
School of Medicine 2010 Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine 2013 Paul Janssen Prize for Biomedical Research 2017 Canada Gairdner International Award SUSAN MERRILL, UCSFDavid Julius entered the biochemistry graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1977. “It was all one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t trying to figure out what I would be doing in 10 years,” says the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) professor of physiology. “When I arrived, I thought, ‘Classes are pretty much over. This is like a real job, and I can just go in the lab and do my thing.’”
Julius joined the UC Berkeley lab of Jeremy Thorner, who was studying hormonal signaling and trying to understand how budding yeast cells switch mating type. Randy Schekman, a Berkeley researcher who worked on protein secretion and vesicular transport, served as Julius’s coadvisor. “What was great about Jeremy and Randy was that they were both trained as biochemists and then had decided to take advantage of the yeast genetic system to understand the biochemistry of cellular signaling.”
Haploid yeast cells can be either “type a” or “type α,” and mate with cells of the opposite type. Julius worked on the synthesis of alpha factor, one of two mating hormones produced and secreted by yeast. His graduate studies produced three Cell papers. The first, published in 1983, ...
