David Julius

David Julius (born November 4, 1955) is an American physiologist and neuroscientist renowned for his discoveries elucidating the molecular basis of thermosensation and pain perception. As the Morris Herzstein Chair in Molecular Biology and Medicine and chair of the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Julius has advanced understanding of how sensory neurons detect temperature, touch, and chemical irritants, laying foundational insights for pain research and therapeutic development. His work, spanning over three decades, has identified key ion channels such as TRPV1 and TRPM8, which serve as molecular sensors for heat and cold, respectively, and has earned him the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Ardem Patapoutian.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, to first-generation American parents of Ashkenazi Jewish descent from Eastern Europe, Julius grew up in the Brighton Beach neighborhood, a close-knit immigrant community that shaped his early experiences. He attended public schools, including Abraham Lincoln High School, before earning a B.S. in life sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977, where he studied tRNA aminoacylation under Alexander Rich. Julius then pursued a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, completing it in 1984 under Jeremy Thorner and Randy Schekman, focusing on peptide hormone processing in yeast. Following postdoctoral training in neuropharmacology at Columbia University with Richard Axel from 1984 to 1989, where he developed expression-cloning techniques to identify serotonin receptor genes, he joined the UCSF faculty in 1989.

David Julius was born on November 4, 1955, in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York. He was a first-generation American, with his parents being children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who had fled antisemitism in Czarist Russia in the early 1900s. His father worked as an electrical engineer, and his mother was an elementary school teacher; both had earned their college degrees from the City University of New York, emphasizing education and opportunity within their close-knit family of three sons.