Alan Hall. 19 May 1952 — 3 May 2015

Abstract

Alan Hall was born in a mining town in Yorkshire in 1952. He studied chemistry at Oxford and then, after starting his PhD in biochemistry in Oxford, he completed it at Harvard in the USA, where he made important discoveries about the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Following postdoctoral studies in the UK and Switzerland, he set up his independent research in London at the Institute of Cancer Research, where he began his work which opened up the field of study of the Ras-homologous family of small GTPase proteins. Alan made seminal discoveries in this field, which revolutionized cell biology in the UK and internationally. Alan's work made connections between cell migration, cancer and cell signalling and provided a mechanistic understanding of how many cell processes work at the molecular level. Alan helped to found the Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology in London and became the director in 2001. In 2006 he moved to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York as chair of Cell Biology. He was awarded the Feldberg Foundation Prize in 1993, the Novartis Medal (UK Biochemical Society) and the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2005, as well as the Canada Gairdner Prize in 2006. He was elected as a European Molecular Biology Organization member in 1994, as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2004.