Dr. Michael Sheetz wins the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award

Excerpt from Columbia News

"Michael Sheetz, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences, won the Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for his part in discoveries concerning cytoskeletal motor proteins, machines that move cargos within cells, contract muscles, and enable cell movements. The basic research award is given to those scientists whose techniques or concepts to the “elimination of major causes of disability and death,” according to the Lasker Foundation.

He won it with two other scientists, Stanford University’s James Spudich and Ronald Vale of the University of California, San Francisco, with whom he’s been working for many years. “I am deeply honored to receive the Lasker with friends and wish to thank the many people in my lab and our collaborators who contributed so much to the overall effort,” said Sheetz.

The Lasker Awards, which carry an honorarium of $250,000 for each category, will be presented at a ceremony on Friday, September 21, in New York City. Since the inception of the Lasker Awards in 1945, 81 Lasker laureates have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, 29 in the last two decades"

Read the Award Description on the Lasker Foundation website.