Louis M. Kunkel
Louis Martens Kunkel (born October 13, 1949 in New York City ) is an American geneticist and physician.
Kunkel received his bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College in 1971 and received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1978 . His dissertation was entitled The identification, purification, and characterization of a portion of human Y-chromosome DNA . As a post-doctoral student he was at the University of California, San Francisco for two years and then did research in pediatrics and genetics at Children's Hospital in Boston. In 1982 he became an instructor and then an associate professor in the genetics department. From 1983 to 1989 he was a lecturer in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School . From 1989 he was director of genetics at Children's Hospital in Boston (the pediatric teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School) and since 2004 Associate Director of Pediatrics at Children's Hospital. He heads a program there that collects medical and genetic data and data on environmental factors from all children treated there for scientific evaluation (Gene Partnership). He is Professor of Pediatrics and Genetics at Harvard Medical School and has also been doing research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1990.
In particular, Kunkel examined the basics of diseases of the neuromuscular system. In 1986/87 he identified the protein dystrophin and the associated gene, which is mutated in the hereditary disease of muscular dystrophy of the Duchenne and Becker type. Since then, he and coworkers have identified over a dozen genes associated with dystrophin and found the cause of limb girdle dystrophies in mutations in three of these genes. In his laboratory he developed positional cloning methods that led to better diagnostic methods for the hereditary diseases he was investigating.
He received the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1989, the Passano Award in Medical Research in 1989 , the Royal Society Wellcome Foundation Prize in 1988 and the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize , the William Allan Award in 2004 and the March of Dimes Prize in Development Biology in 2009 (for his development Positional Cloning Techniques). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kunkel, Louis M. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Kunkel, Louis Martens |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American geneticist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 13, 1949 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | New York City |