Tom Rapoport

Tom Abraham Rapoport (born June 17, 1947) is a German-American cell biologist who studies protein transport in cells.

Currently, he is a professor at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he grew up in East Germany.

Rapoport was born in Cincinnati in 1947.

His parents, Samuel Mitja Rapoport and Ingeborg Rapoport, had fled the Nazis, and when he was three years old, they fled the United States in 1950 due to being investigated for un-American activities.

He moved to the United States, the country his parents fled from in 1950, in 1995.

After a brief stay in Vienna, they finally settled in Berlin in the German Democratic Republic in 1952, where his father became a Professor for Biochemistry and director of the Institute of Physiological Chemistry of the Humboldt-University, and his mother became a Professor for neonatology at the Charite Hospital.

His brother is mathematician Michael Rapoport.

Tom A. Rapoport 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.

At Humboldt he collaborated with Reinhart Heinrich on the mathematical modeling of glycolysis in red blood cells, leading to the establishment of metabolic control theory on which they submitted a joint 'habilitation' thesis.

At the same time he worked with Sinaida Rosenthal, a former student of his father, on cloning the insulin gene from carp.

In 1979 he moved to the Zentralinstitut für Molekularbiologie der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, later called the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, where he became a professor in 1985.

In 1995 he accepted an offer to become a professor at Harvard Medical School.

He has been a professor at the Harvard Medical School since 1995, and an HHMI investigator since 1997.

He studies several aspects of cellular secretion, including the mechanisms by which newly synthesized proteins are translocated from the cytosol to the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum by the Sec61 complex (also known as the translocon), how misfolded secretory proteins are degraded by endoplasmic reticulum associated protein degradation (also known as ERAD), and how reticulons and related proteins regulate the morphology of the endoplasmic reticulum.

In 1997 he became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He is a member of the American and German National Academies of Science.