Randy Schekman

Randy Wayne Schekman (born December 30, 1948) is an American biochemist and cell biologist renowned for his pioneering discoveries of the genetic basis of vesicle trafficking, the cellular machinery that regulates the transport and fusion of membrane-enclosed compartments within eukaryotic cells. For this work, which elucidated how cells manage the secretory pathway using yeast mutants to identify over 100 genes involved in vesicle formation, budding, and fusion, Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with James E. Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Schekman grew up in Southern California after his family relocated there during his early childhood; he attended Western High School in Anaheim and developed an interest in biology influenced by popular science books on microbiology and genetics. He earned a B.A. in molecular biology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1971, where he initially pursued pre-medical studies before shifting to research-oriented biology, and completed a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Stanford University in 1975 under the supervision of Arthur Kornberg, focusing on bacteriophage replication.

Randy Schekman was born on December 30, 1948, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a Jewish family. His father, Alfred Schekman, was a mechanical engineer who worked at General Mills after attending the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, while his mother, Esther Bader Schekman, was a homemaker who had worked part-time in a department store and lacked a college education. Schekman's paternal grandparents, Norman and Rose Schekman, were immigrants; his grandfather was a traveling salesman. His maternal grandparents, Raymond and Ida Bader, had immigrated from Bessarabia (now part of Moldova and Ukraine) in 1927, with his grandfather working as a tailor.