Illustrated portrait of Ardem Patapoutian.
Illustration by Richard A. Chance

Sensing touch, the immigrant life and Ardem Patapoutian

The Nobel Prize winner talks about PIEZO 1 and 2, proprioception and the viral photo of him and his son from the 2021 Nobel Prize announcement.

Ardem Patapoutian is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of neuroscience at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California. In his episode of “Synaptic,” he talks about the scary incident that prompted his emigration from Lebanon to the United States, his time at the University of California, Los Angeles, and how winning the Nobel Prize was liberating both in and outside the lab.

Read the transcript.