1. Randy Wayne Schekman was born on December 30,1948 and is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology.
Randy Schekman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.
Randy Schekman's family were Jewish emigrants from Russia and Bessarabia.
Randy Schekman graduated from Western High School in Anaheim, California, in 1966.
Randy Schekman received a BA in molecular biology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1971.
Randy Schekman spent his third year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, as an exchange student.
Randy Schekman received a PhD in 1975 from Stanford University for research on DNA replication working with Arthur Kornberg.
Since 1991, Randy Schekman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, division of biochemistry and molecular biology, department of molecular and cell biology, at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1987 Randy Schekman received the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology.
In 1992, Randy Schekman was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
In 2002, Randy Schekman received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University along with James Rothman for their discovery of cellular membrane trafficking, a process that cells use to organize their activities and communicate with their environment.
Randy Schekman was awarded the Massry Prize from the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, in 2010.
Randy Schekman serves as a member of the Selection Committee and then as chair of Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize.
Randy Schekman was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2013.
The cell-free reactions that Randy Schekman established led to his isolation of the Sec61 translocation complex, the vesicle coat complex, and the first purified inter-organelle transport vesicles.
The Sec proteins are strikingly conserved and the trafficking mechanisms that Randy Schekman discovered are at the heart of neurotransmission, hormone secretion, cholesterol homeostasis and metabolic regulation.
Randy Schekman donated his share of the prize money, $400,000, to create an endowment for the Esther and Wendy Randy Schekman Chair in Basic Cancer Biology at UC Berkeley.
In 2017, Randy Schekman received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
In 2021, Professor Randy Schekman was elected honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova, with which he has been collaborating since 2019.
In December 2013, Randy Schekman called for academic journal publishing reform and open access science publication by announcing that his lab at the University of California, Berkeley would no longer submit to the prestigious closed-access journals Nature, Cell, and Science, citing their self-serving and deleterious effects on science.
Randy Schekman has criticized these journals for artificially restricting the number of publications accepted to drive up demand.
Randy Schekman has said the prestige and difficulty of publishing in these journals sometimes cause scientists to cut corners or pursue trends, rather than conduct research on important questions.
Randy Schekman is the former editor of eLife, an open access journal and competitor to Nature, Cell, and Science.