Biography
Jack Leonard Strominger (born August 7, 1925) [ 1 ] is the Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard University , specializing in the structure and function of human histocompatibility proteins and their role in disease. He won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1995. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] Strominger was born in New York City . He was born one of three brothers to a dentist father. He graduated from Bayside High School . He studied at Harvard University and completed his degree in psychology in 1944. During World War II , he entered the Navy V-12 program as part of Harvard College. In March 1946, he was discharged from the Navy. He received his MD degree in 1948 from Yale Medical School . [ 4 ] After graduation he joined the faculty at the Washington University School of Medicine . There he obtained a fellowship in the Department of Pharmacology with Oliver H. Lowry . Afterwards, he completed his residency in medicine at the University of Chicago , where he met his wife Ann, who was a student. In 1951, during the Korean War the United States Navy called him back into service to be stationed at a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand . Strominger married, and together, the newlyweds went to Bangkok. But, after only two or three months, he was ordered by the United States Navy to leave Bangkok. The remainder of his appointment as a commissioned officer was at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland under Sanford Rosenthal , chief of the Laboratory of Pharmacology in the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases. From work he had done in the Lowry laboratory and using work begun by James T. Park, Strominger began new work into the recently-purified-compound penicillin 's antibiotic mechanism of action. Strominger left the NIH, and, after brief study at Carlsberg Laboratory and Cambridge University , returned to Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor of pharmacology. At Washington University in St. Louis, he d Fields: Biochemistry, Immunology
About the Lasker Award
The Lasker Awards have been awarded annually since 1946 to living persons who have made major contributions to medical science or who have performed public service on behalf of medicine. They are administered by the Lasker Foundation, founded by advertising pioneer Albert Lasker and his wife Mary Woodard Lasker (a medical research activist). The awards are sometimes referred to as "America's Nobels."
Quick Facts
- Award: Lasker Award - Basic Medical Research
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Established: 1946
- Presented by: Lasker Foundation