David Clapham, MD, PhD, a renowned ion channel biologist and former leader of Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), will present a Discovery Lecture Thursday, April 2.
His presentation, “Ion Channels in Organelles and Primary Cilia,” begins at 4 p.m. in 202 Light Hall.
Clapham is the Aldo R. Castañeda Professor Emeritus of Cardiovascular Research at Boston Children’s Hospital; professor emeritus of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School; former Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of HHMI; and senior group leader emeritus of Janelia Research Campus. He retired in September 2025.
Over the course of his 50-year career, Clapham made fundamental contributions to the discovery and characterization of ion channels — proteins that allow charged particles (ions) to move across cell membranes. By regulating the movement of ions, ion channels control electrical signaling and other essential cellular functions.
Due to difficult accessibility, the many unique ion channels in small cellular compartments have only recently begun to be identified and have their functions defined. Clapham will discuss how ion channels are directly measured in mitochondria, lysosomes, endoplasmic reticulum and primary cilia, and how they control the inner lives of cells.
Clapham earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology before entering the MD-PhD program at Emory University. He was a Fulbright Scholar with Nobel Prize winner Erwin Neher, who, with Bert Sakmann, invented the patch-clamp technique to measure the opening and closing of individual ion channels at millisecond resolution.
Clapham completed internal medicine residency training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School before establishing his independent research laboratory at Harvard. He later spent 10 years on the faculty of Mayo Clinic and then returned to Harvard Medical School at Boston Children’s Hospital in 1997, where he was an HHMI Investigator before joining HHMI leadership.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Clapham’s Discovery Lecture is sponsored by the Vanderbilt Medical Scientist Training Program.
