Life scientists

James German

James German, also known as James L. German, was an American human geneticist who spent 50 years studying Bloom's syndrome and founded the Bloom's Syndrome Registry.

James Giovannoni

James Giovannoni is an American plant molecular biologist at the USDA who cloned the tomato RIN ripening gene and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Sir James Gray (1891–1975) was an English zoologist who held the Professorship of Zoology at Cambridge and pioneered the experimental study of animal locomotion, including Gray's paradox about dolphin swimming speed.

James H. Fallon

James H. Fallon (1947–2023) was an American neuroscientist at UC Irvine who discovered his own brain scan matched the pattern he had described in psychopaths.

James H. Gear

James H. Gear, full name James Henderson Sutherland Gear, was a South African virologist who established Coxsackie B virus as a cause of newborn myocarditis.

James H. Hurley

James H. Hurley is an American structural cell biologist and Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley who spent 21 years at NIH and is known for the ESCRT membrane-severing machinery, autophagy, and HIV hijacking of membrane traffic.

James H. Schwartz

James H. Schwartz (1932–2006) was an American neurobiologist at Columbia University who helped establish the molecular study of learning and memory in the sea slug Aplysia.

James H. Thomas

James H. Thomas is an American geneticist at the University of Washington known for research on dauer formation, aging, and gene family evolution in C. elegans.

James Henderson Sutherland Gear

James Henderson Sutherland Gear (1905–1994) was a South African virologist who established Coxsackie B virus as the cause of myocarditis in newborns and led South Africa's polio vaccine research.

James Hicks

James B. Hicks, born 1946 in Neenah, Wisconsin, is an American molecular biologist known for yeast mating type switching and single-cell genomics of breast and prostate cancer.

James I. Garrels

James I. Garrels is a biologist who created the Yeast Proteome Database, the first annotated database for a complete proteome, and directed the QUEST center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

James I. Mullins

James I. Mullins is a virologist known for studying the evolution of HIV and retroviruses, and for professorships at Stanford and the University of Washington, retiring in 2025.

James J. Chou

James J. Chou is a structural biologist known for using solution NMR spectroscopy to determine membrane protein structures, including the apoptotic protein BID and the death receptor DR5.

James J. Collins

James J. Collins is an American bioengineer, Termeer Professor at MIT since 2014, and one of the founders of synthetic biology, known for the 2000 genetic toggle switch in E. coli.

James J. DiCarlo

James J. DiCarlo, also known as James DiCarlo, is an American neuroscientist at MIT who studies how the primate brain recognizes objects and created the Brain-Score benchmark.

James J. Moon

James J. Moon is an immunoengineer who chairs Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Michigan, develops nanomaterial-based vaccines and immunotherapies, and co-founded EVOQ Therapeutics and Saros Therapeutics.

James Jung

James Jung is a structural biologist using cryo-EM to determine virus and protein–RNA structures, known for the 2019 discovery that human norovirus shells form multiple particle sizes.

James Keck

James L. Keck is an American structural biologist and biochemist, Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, known for work on bacterial replication restart.

James Knierim

James J. Knierim is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies memory in the hippocampus, known for work on CA3, CA1, and path integration.

James L. Gould

James L. Gould (born 1945) is an American biologist who spent his career at Princeton University, known for work on honey bee dance communication and navigation.

James L. Maller

James L. Maller (1946–2018) was an American biochemist and University of Colorado pharmacology professor who purified maturation-promoting factor, the complex of Cdc2 and cyclin B that drives cell division.

James L. Manley

James L. Manley is a Columbia University molecular biologist known for discovering the first alternative splicing factor and for characterizing the factors that polyadenylate messenger RNA precursors.

James L. McGaugh

James L. McGaugh, born 1931, is an American neuroscientist who spent his career at UC Irvine showing that stress hormones acting on the amygdala strengthen memory consolidation.

James L. Salzer

James L. Salzer is an American cellular neuroscientist and professor of neuroscience and neurology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, known for studies of myelination, Schwann cells, and remyelination.

James Learmonth Gowans

Sir James Learmonth Gowans (1924–2020) was a British immunologist who showed that small lymphocytes recirculate between blood and lymph, work that underpinned selective immunosuppression in organ transplantation.

James Leonard Brierley Smith

James Leonard Brierley Smith (1897–1968) was a South African chemist-turned-ichthyologist at Rhodes University who identified the first living coelacanth in 1938 and led the fourteen-year search that recovered a second specimen in 1952.

James Letts

James Letts is an American-trained membrane protein biochemist and structural biologist who solved the first atomic-resolution structures of mammalian mitochondrial complex I, winning the 2025 PECASE.

James M. Berger

James M. Berger is an American structural biologist and biochemist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, known for determining the structures of type II DNA topoisomerases and helicases.

James M. Musser

James M. Musser is a physician-scientist in bacterial pathogenesis and genomic medicine, chair of pathology at Houston Methodist, known for studies of group A Streptococcus and tuberculosis.