Seattle Proteome Center (SPC)
NHLBI Proteomics Center at the Institute for Systems Biology

Executive Committee Profiles

Ruedi Aebersold

Ruedi Aebersold, Director of the SPC, is a founding member of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, where he leads a research effort that is focused on developing new methods and technologies for understanding the structure, function, and control of complex biological systems. He completed his undergraduate studies in biology at the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1979 and received a Ph.D. in cell biology at the University of Basel in 1984. Holding fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation and EMBO he joined the California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow (1984-86) and remained at Caltech as a senior research fellow (1986-88). In 1988 he joined the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and as a senior investigator at the Biomedical Research Centre. In 1993, he moved to the University of Washington as an Associate Professor in Molecular Biotechnology and was promoted to full Professor in 1998. In 2000, he left the University of Washington and joined the Institute for Systems Biology as co-founder and full faculty member.

Dr. Aebersold's research and teaching have been recognized by the Killam Research Prize, the Pehr Edman Award, the Widmer Award, the Biemann Medal, and the World Technology Network Award for Biotechnology. Dr. Aebersold is a consulting editor for the journal Physiological Genomics, has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of Protein Science (1992-98), Functional Proteomics (1999-present), Analytical Biochemistry (1991-2001), Functional and Integrative Genomics (1999-present), Electrophoresis (1989-1993) and an associate editor for Molecular and Cellular Proteomics.

Elaine W. Raines is a Research Professor in the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington Medical School. For the past 28 years, her laboratory has been investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved in the formation of lesions of atherosclerosis - the disease process responsible for heart attacks and strokes. Using a combination cell and molecular biology approaches, her laboratory is testing the role of specific genes in the regulation of vascular cell function in culture and in mouse models of atherosclerosis in vivo. They have recently developed novel approaches to examine the importance of specific macrophage genes in vivo at different stages of atherosclerotic lesion development.