Professor Irwin Levitan
University of Pennsylvania

Irwin Levitan received his B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Biochemistry from McGill University in Montreal. After postdoctoral stays at the University of Gothenburg and the University of California at San Diego, he was a Group Leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, where he began investigations of the regulation of neuronal excitability in the marine mollusc Aplysia. He continued these studies after moving to the Department of Biochemistry at Brandeis University, where he was Professor of Biochemistry and founding Director of the Volen Center for Complex Systems. While at Brandeis he began investigating the modulation of ion channel proteins, using a combination of molecular and biophysical approaches. More recently he has been pursuing the concept that ion channels do not function on their own in the plasma membrane, but rather exist as part of a multi-protein regulatory complex that includes not only the ion channel protein itself, but also one or more signaling proteins that participate in the modulation of channel properties. In 2000 Levitan moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the David Mahoney Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience in the School of Medicine, and also directs the campus-wide Mahoney Institute of Neurological Sciences.