Dr. James Heath

Dr. James R. Heath is President and Professor at Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. Heath also has Affiliate Faculty appointments at the University of Washington Bioengineering, Physics and Chemistry departments. Formerly, he was the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA, and served as co-director of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at UCLA.

Heath received his PhD in 1988 from Rice University, where he was the principal graduate student involved in the discovery of C60 and the fullerenes. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining the research staff at IBM Watson Labs in 1991. He took a faculty position at UCLA in 1994, and moved to Caltech in 2003.

He has received several awards and honors, including the Irving Weinstein Award from the American Association of Cancer Researchers, and the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences. In 2009, he was named one of the top seven innovators in the world by Forbes Magazine.