Professor Paul Wassarman

Professor Paul Wassarman received a BS and MS from the University of Massachusetts and a PhD in biochemistry from Brandeis University. He was a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (1967-1970) and a Rockefeller Foundation special research fellow and faculty member in Biological Chemistry at Harvard Medical School (1972-1986). He was Chair and Member of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology and Adjunct Professor of Cell Biology at New York University Medical School (1986-1996). Since 1996 he has been a Full Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and held the Stratton Professorial Chair in Cell, Developmental, and Regenerative Biology.

He has mentored 8 PhD students and 40 postdoctoral fellows in his laboratory, published more than 250 research papers and reviews, and edited more than a dozen scientific books and journals. He is author of A Place in History: The Biography of John C. Kendrew published by Oxford University Press in 2020 and co-author of A Guide to Zona Pellucida Domain Proteins published by Wiley and Sons in 2015. Since 2008 he has been series editor of Current Topics in Developmental Biology published 5-times a year by Academic Press/Elsevier. He has served on several NIH study sections and editorial boards, presented more than 150 research seminars at universities and medical schools, and spoken at more than 100 conferences and symposia worldwide.

He was trained in enzymology and protein chemistry as a graduate student and structural biology as a postdoctoral fellow. Since 1972 his laboratory has carried out basic research on oogenesis and fertilization in mice and DNA replication by a polyomavirus. The former research led to identification and characterization of receptors for sperm in the zona pellucida of unfertilized eggs and to a fuller understanding of egg development and species-restricted fertilization in mammals.

At Clare Hall, Paul is accompanied by his wife, Eveline S. Litscher, PhD, Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai – a researcher and expert on mammalian and non-mammalian oogenesis, fertilization, and early development.