David Ron

David Ron is a British biochemist.

Biography and family

David Ron's parents, Arza and Amiram Ron, were professors of Chemistry and Physics at the Technion. His younger sister, Dana Ron Goldreich, is a computer scientist at Tel Aviv University. In 1972, Ron graduated from Municipal High-school III in Nave Sha'anan, Haifa.

Higher education and career

Awarded a medical degree from the Faculty of Medicine, Technion in Haifa Israel in 1980, Ron 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.
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.

Research

His laboratory researches molecular mechanisms by which secretory cells adapt to the burden of unfolded proteins in their endoplasmic reticulum. His research group has identified, among other cellular mechanisms, the stress induced protein PERK present in the endoplasmic reticulum.

Awards and honours

Ron was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His nomination noted his work on the endoplasmic reticulum, specifically stress induced on cells from misfolded proteins within that organelle, and the consequences of that stress. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2013, and in the nomination his identifications of the transcription factor CHOP and the ER stress inducer PERK were also mentioned among other achievements from his research.