Dr. Zhijian ‘James’ Chen is the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Sciences, director of the Center for Inflammation Research, and professor in the department of molecular biology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He is an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Prior to moving to Dallas, Dr. Chen was a senior scientist at ProScript, Inc., where he helped discover the proteasome inhibitor VELCADE, a medicine used for the treatment of multiple myeloma. After joining UT Southwestern in 1997, he discovered the regulatory role of ubiquitination in protein kinase activation in the NF-kB and MAP kinase pathways. In addition, he discovered the Mitochondrial Antiviral Signaling (MAVS) protein that reveals a new role of mitochondria in immunity. More recently, he discovered cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) as a cytosolic DNA sensor and a new cyclic di-nucleotide signaling pathway that mediate innate immune responses in animal cells.
For his work, Dr. Chen has received numerous honors including the National Academy of Science Award in Molecular Biology (2012), the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) Merck Award (2015), the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences from the Foundation of NIH (2018), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2019), the Switzer Prize (2019), and the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology (2020). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
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