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Distinguished Professor, Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology Human Genetics Member, ACCESS Program: Dept. of Molecular, Cell & Developmental Biology Basic/Translational Research, Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Faculty, Bioinformatics IDP

A Short Biography:

James A. Lake is a molecular biologist and evolutionary genomicist who has been on the UCLA Faculty since 1976. He became a Full Professor in Molecular, Cell, and Developmental Biology in 1976, and has been a Distinguished Professor of MCD Biology since 1996, and a Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics since 2002. Jim Lake earned his B.S. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his Ph.D., in physics, from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, working on the structure of transfer RNAs. He was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT from 1967-68, and at Harvard Medical School, from 1958-70, working on ribosomal structure and devising new methods for the three dimensional analyses of large structures. As an Assistant Professor of Cell Biology at Rockefeller University (1970-1973), an Associate Professor of Cell Biology at New York University Medical School (1973-1976), and upon coming to UCLA he and his lab continued their studies of ribosome structure, ultimately mapping the 3D locations of ribosomal proteins and rRNAs, and developing the ribosome model widely found in text books. Through rRNA sequencing his lab, in collaboration with others, has been central in developing the New Animal Phylogeny for the evolution of the multicellular animals, which is now well known and widely accepted. His laboratory is currently focused on using genomics to understand the evolution of life. Within the last few years they have changed the tree of life significantly and shown that the tree of life is actually a ring of life, and that the Eukaryotes originated as the result of a genome fusion between an archaebacterium and a eubacterium. Presently they are making considerable progress in rooting the tree/ring of life using the enormous amount of genomic data now available.

Selected Publications: