James A. Spudich, PhD, the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Cardiovascular Disease in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine, will be the next speaker in the 2016 Senior Vice Chancellor’s Laureate Lecture Series, a yearlong program highlighting top biomedical researchers in their fields. Dr. Spudich’s lecture, “Molecular Motors: Nature’s Exquisite Nanomachines,” will take place at noon on Thursday, April 28, in Lecture Room 6, Scaife Hall.

Dr. Spudich has long explored the structure and function of the myosin family of molecular motors in vitro and in vivo, which led him to focus on the human cardiac sarcomere and the molecular basis of hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathy. His team researches the molecular basis of energy transduction that leads to ATP-driven myosin movement on actin, as well as the roles of the myosin family of molecular motors in eukaryotic cells. He and colleagues have developed multiple new tools, including in vitro motility assays honed to the single-molecule level using laser traps, and they use them to investigate normal and diseased human cardiac function.

Dr. Spudich was the founding director of Bio-X, the Stanford Interdisciplinary Program in Bioengineering, Biomedicine, and Biosciences. He is also an adjunct professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and InStem in Bangalore, India. 

Dr. Spudich received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois and his PhD in biochemistry from Stanford in 1968. He completed postdoctoral work in genetics at Stanford and in structural biology at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He previously taught in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, before being appointed professor in the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford, where he served as chair from 1979–84. Since 1992, he has been professor in the Department of Biochemistry, which he chaired from 1994–98. Dr. Spudich has held a joint appointment as professor in the Department of Developmental Biology since 1989.

Dr. Spudich’s honors and awards include the 2012 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the Ahmed H. Zewail Gold Medal Award from Wayne State University, the Massry Prize, the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences from the Rockefeller University, and an NIH Merit Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.