Tom Rapoport

Tom Rapoport
150px Tom Rapoport
Born	(1947-06-17)June 17, 1947 Cincinnati, Ohio
Residence	Brookline, Massachusetts
Citizenship	United States, Germany (East Germany until 1990)
Employer	East German Academy of Sciences, Harvard Medical School, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Tom Abraham Rapoport (17 June 1947) is a German-American cell biologist who studies protein transport in cells. Currently, he is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Born in Cincinnati, OH, he grew up in the German Democratic Republic. In 1995 he accepted an offer to become a professor at Harvard Medical School, Boston. In 1997 he became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Biography

Rapoport was born in Cincinnati in 1947. His parents, Samuel Mitja Rapoport and Ingeborg Rapoport, had fled the Nazis, and when he was three years old they fled the United States in 1950 due to being investigated for un-American activities. After a brief stay in Vienna, they finally settled in Berlin in the German Democratic Republic in 1952, where his father became a Professor for Biochemistry and director of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry of the Humboldt-University, and his mother became a Professor for neonatology at the Charite Hospital. His brother is mathematician Michael Rapoport. Tom A. Rapoport received his PhD on mathematical modeling of the kinetics of inorganic pyrophosphatase in 1972 from Humboldt University. He worked in the lab of Peter Heitmann, and his father, Samuel Mitja Rapoport, was head of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry. At Humboldt he collaborated with Reinhart Heinrich on the mathematical modeling of glycolysis in red blood cells, leading to the establishment of metabolic control theory on which they submitted a joint 'habilitation' thesis. At the same time he worked with Sinaida Rosenthal, a former student of his father, on cloning the insulin gene from carp.

In 1979 he moved to the Zentralinstitut für Molekularbiologie der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, later called the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, where he became a professor in 1985. He moved to the United States, the country his parents fled from in 1950, in 1995. He has been a professor at the Harvard Medical School since 1995, and an HHMI investigator since 1997.

He studies several aspects of cellular secretion, including the mechanisms by which newly synthesized proteins are translocated from the cytosol to the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum by the Sec61 complex (also known as the translocon), how misfolded secretory proteins are degraded by endoplasmic reticulum associated protein degradation (also known as ERAD), and how reticulons and related proteins regulate the morphology of the endoplasmic reticulum.

Awards

• 2004 Awarded Otto Warburg Medal of the German Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
• 2005 Awarded Max Delbrück Medal of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine.
• 2011 Awarded the Schleiden Medal from the Leopoldina

External links

• Profile at Harvard Medical School
• Profile at the HHMI
• Rapoport laboratory website
• Tom Rapoport, A Preliminary Report on My Life in Science, Mol. Biol. Cell Vol. 21, 3770–3772, November 15, 2010
• NIH Seminar Series, Mechanisms of Protein Translocation Across Membranes, May 20, 2009 on YouTube