Larry Zipursky

S. Lawrence Zipursky received his A.B. in Chemistry from Oberlin College in 1977 and his Ph.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1981, where he worked on the enzymology of DNA replication in E.coli. Dr. Zipursky was a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Seymour Benzer at the California Institute of Technology where he began his work in developmental neurobiology. In 1985, Dr. Zipursky became an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Zipursky is currently a Professor in the department and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Between 2004-2007, Dr. Zipursky was the Chairman of the Department of Biological Chemistry. He is a recipient of the McKnight Foundation Scholars Award and Sloan Scholars Award. In 1998, Dr. Zipursky was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Early work from the Zipursky lab focused on pattern formation in the developing Drosophila compound eye and included studies on inductive interactions, the regulation of eye specification pathways and the cell cycle regulation. In the mid 1990s, Zipursky and his colleagues set out to identify the cell surface recognition proteins and signal transduction machinery regulating the formation of neural circuits. In 2000, Zipursky and his colleague discovered the Dscam gene encoding tens of thousands of isoforms and in later work demonstrated that diferent isoforms exhibit different binding specificities and that this diversity is essential for neural circuit assembly. The Zipursky lab continues to study the genetics and biochemistry of Dscam, as well as other cell surface proteins regulating neural circuit assembly in Drosophila.