David Ron

Raised in an academic family - his parents, Arza and Amiram Ron, were professors of Chemistry and Physics at the Technion and his younger sister Dana Ron Goldreich is a computer scientists at Tel Aviv University - in 1972 he graduated from Municipal High-school III in נוה שאנן, חיפה

Awarded a medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine, Technion in Haifa Israel in 1980, he went to medical internship and residency training at Mount Sinai Medical Center, in New York City and in 1989 completed subspecialty training in Endocrinology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, followed by four-years of post-doctoral research training with Joel Habner a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Researcher at Harvard Medical School. From 1992 to 2009 he was a member of the faculty at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine of New York University School of Medicine and in 2010 he moved to The Clinical School of Cambridge University where he serves as a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and the Professor of Cellular Pathophysiology and Clinical Biochemistry with a laboratory based at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.

His laboratory researches molecular mechanisms by which secretory cells adapt to the burden of unfolded proteins in their endoplasmic reticulum.[3]

Ron was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His nomination reads:

David Ron has pioneered our understanding of how cells cope with the stress induced by protein misfolding in the endoplasmic reticulum. This stress is increasingly recognised to contribute to many diseases including endocrine disorders and neurodegeneration. Among many achievements, he has deciphered the molecular mechanism by which cells match protein synthesis rates to protein folding in the secretory pathway. His greatest conceptual contribution has been to reveal the precariousness of the protein folding environment in the ER and to highlight how it is challenged by subtle failure of homeostasis – concepts with both fundamental implications to biology and therapeutic application.[1]

Ron was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2013. His nomination reads

David Ron is Professor of Cellular Pathophysiology and Clinical Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. Protein misfolding in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER stress) is implicated in processes from neurodegeneration to endocrine disorders. David Ron has been at the forefront of this confluence of Cell Biology and Pathophysiology. He identified the transcription factor CHOP and discovered its role in deregulating adipose tissue development in liposarcoma. He identified the ER stress transducer PERK, establishing the molecular mechanism by which unfolded protein stress regulates protein synthesis and identified the long-sought mammalian counterpart of the yeast master regulator of gene expression in the UPR, IRE1. An endocrinologist by training, he remains committed to laboratory-based disease-oriented research.[2]