Randy Wayne Schekman (born December 30, 1948) is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking. Early life and education Schekman was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Alfred Schekman, an electrical engineer and computer software designer and Esther (Bader) Schekman. His family were Jewish emigrants from Russia and Bessarabia. In the late 1950s his family moved to the new suburban community of Rossmoor, located in Orange County next to Long Beach. He graduated from Western High School in Anaheim, California, in 1966. He received a BA in Molecular Biology from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1971. He spent his third year at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, as an exchange student. He received a PhD in 1975 from Stanford University for research on DNA replication working with Arthur Kornberg. After joining the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1981 and Professor in 1984. Research and career Since 1991, Schekman has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, at the University of California, Berkeley. The Schekman Lab at that university carries out research into molecular descriptions of the process of membrane assembly and vesicular traffic in eukaryotic cells including yeast. Before that, he was a faculty member with the now disbanded Department of Biochemistry at the same university. Awards and honors In 1987 Schekman received the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology. In 1992, Schekman was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, Schekman received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University along with James Rothman for their discovery of cellular membrane trafficking, a process that cells use to organize their activities and communicate with their environment. In 2008 he was