Biography
Steven Clarke has been on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry since 1978. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the UCLA Cellular and Molecular Biology Training Program. He was born in Los Angeles and attended public schools in Altadena and Pasadena, California. He did his undergraduate work at Pomona College in Claremont, majoring in Chemistry and Zoology. During this time, he did undergraduate research at the UCLA Brain Research Institute with Dr. James E. Skinner and Professor Donald Lindsley on neural mechanisms of attention. He was also an NIH fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Mitchell at Glynn Research Laboratories in Bodmin, England studying mitochondrial amino acid transport. He obtained his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University working as an NSF Fellow with Professor Guido Guidotti on membrane protein-detergent interactions and the identification of the major rat liver mitochondrial polypeptides as enzymes of the urea cycle. He returned to California to do postdoctoral work as a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, with Professor Dan Koshland, identifying membrane receptors for bacterial chemotaxis. His research at UCLA has focused on roles of novel protein methyltransferases in aging and biological regulation highlighted by discoveries of the protein L-isoaspartyl repair methyltransferase, the isoprenylcysteine protein methyltransferase, and the protein phosphatase 2A methyltransferase. He has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University (1986-87), the University of Washington (2004-2005), and Vanderbilt University (2015).
Publications
A selected list of publications:
Biography
Denson G. Fujikawa is a neurologist and neuroscientist who has been a member of the UCLA faculty since he joined the Department of Neurology in as a clinical instructor in 1981. Dr. Fujikawa is at the Sepulveda VA Ambulatory Care Center. He became an Adjunct Professor in 1996, and has been a Staff Neurologist at Sepulveda since 1983. Dr. Fujikawa earned his A.B. degree magna cum laude in psychology at Harvard University, and his M.D. degree at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. He did two years of general surgery residency at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, two years of of neurosurgery residency at UCLA Medical Center, then switched to neurology, completing his residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in 1981. He then spent two years as a research fellow in Dr. Claude Wasterlain’s Epilepsy Research Laboratory at Sepulveda. He spends half his time in clinical neurology, training UCLA neurology residents, with a subspecialty interest in epilepsy, and half his time doing basic research on in vivo mechanisms of naturally occurring apoptotic and pathologically induced necrotic neuronal death.