Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and Department of Neuroscience, Samuel Theobald Professor, Wilmer Eye Institute (Department of Ophthalmology)

Jeremy NATHANS

Professor
2024 WLA Prize Laureate in Life Science or Medicine Professor,
Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics,
and Department of Neuroscience,
Samuel Theobald Professor, Wilmer Eye Institute (Department of Ophthalmology)
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Jeremy Nathans is a Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Neuroscience, and Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He attended the Baltimore City Public Schools, received his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtained M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from the Stanford University School of Medicine, and conducted postdoctoral research at Genentech. .As a starting doctoral student, Nathans heard a pair of lectures on vertebrate photoreceptors that deeply impressed him with the beauty of the visual system. That sense of awe has only deepened with the passage of time. 

At Stanford, Nathans isolated the genes coding for the human light receptors, work that revealed the first sequences of G-protein coupled receptors and that led to the elucidation of the molecular basis of inherited variation in color vision. At Johns Hopkins, Nathans, together with his students, have defined fundamental mechanisms of retinal development, function, and disease. In its work on retinal disease, the Nathans laboratory determined the mechanistic basis of the most common form of autosomal dominant retinitis pigmentosa, the two most common early-onset forms of macular degeneration, and the retinal vascular disorders Norrie disease and familial exudative vitreoretinopathy. Nathans and his students have used a wide variety of experimental approaches, including human and mouse genetics, biochemistry, cell biology, computational genomics, and structural biology. The current focus of the Nathans laboratory is on vascular biology, with a special emphasis on the blood-retina barrier and the blood-brain barrier.