Tom Rapoport

Who is Tom Rapoport?

Tom Abraham Rapoport is a German-American cell biologist who studies protein transport in cells.

He has been a professor at the Harvard Medical School since 1995, and an HHMI investigator since 1997. He was a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR from 1988 until 1992, he has been a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 2003, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 2005, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was awarded the Max Delbrück Medal in 2005.

Rapoport was born in Cincinnati in 1947. His parents had fled the Nazis, and when he was three years old they returned first to Austria and then to East Germany in 1951. His brother is mathematician Michael Rapoport. He received his PhD on mathematical modeling of the kinetics of inorganic pyrophosphatase in 1972 from Humboldt University. He worked in the lab of Peter Heitmann, and his father, Samuel Mitja Rapoport, was head of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry.