Roderick MacKinnon

American physician and scientist, shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in chemistry for insights into working with channels into cell membranes. In 1999, he was awarded the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.

Fascinated by science as a young boy, he graduated from Brandeis University in 1978 with a major in biochemistry and earned his MD from Tufts University in 1982. In 1986, however, he gave up his promising medical career to investigate scientific problems and returned to Brandeis for postdoctoral work in biochemistry while continuing to work for the Harvard Medical School laboratory.

In 1996, he and his wife moved to New York where he joined the Rockefeller University faculty, is a member of Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honors Society, a PEW scholar in the Biomedical Sciences and the recipient of the McKnight Scholars Award, the Biophysical Society Young Investigator Award, the McKnight Investigator Award, the W. Alden Spencer Award and the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize. He has also been an investigator for the prestigious Howard Hughes Medical Institute where his interest has been the principles of electricity in biology.

In 2000, MacKinnon was elected to membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS).