Ardem Patapoutian is professor of neuroscience and Presidential Endowed Chair in Neurobiology at Scripps Research. He is a molecular biologist specializing in sensory transduction, and his research has led to the identification of receptors activated by temperature and pressure. His laboratory has shown that these ion channels play crucial roles in sensing temperature, touch, proprioception, pain, and blood pressure.
Patapoutian is an American scientist of Armenian origin. He was born in Lebanon and attended the American University of Beirut for one year before he immigrated to the United States in 1986 and became a U.S. citizen. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1990 and earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 1996. He did postdoctoral work with Louis Reichardt at the University of California, San Francisco, before joining the faculty at Scripps Research in 2000.
Patapoutian was awarded the Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 2006 and was named an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2014. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2016), a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2017) and a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2020). He is a co-recipient of the 2017 Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University, the 2019 Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research, the 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
