Joseph Schlessinger

His father, hungarian-jewish Imre, was from Szalatnok, Kingdom of Hungary, since 1920 Slatina; Imre's first wife and child had been deported to Auschwitz.

Schlessinger's mother Rivka was from Bugojno; her first husband had been murdered by the Ustaše.

Imre and Rivka met in a labor camp on the Adriatic island of Rab in 1943 and joined a group of Jewish Partisans.

Joseph Schlessinger (born Josip Schlessinger; 26 March 1945) is a Yugoslav-born Israeli-American biochemist and biophysician.

He is chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the founding director of the school's new Cancer Biology Institute.

His area of research is signaling through tyrosine phosphorylation, which is important in many areas of cellular regulation, especially growth control and cancer.

Schlessinger's work has led to an understanding of the mechanism of transmembrane signaling by receptor tyrosine kinases and how the resulting signals control cell growth and differentiation.

Josip Schlessinger was born in Topusko to Jewish parents.

When Schlessinger was born on 26 March 1945 he was wrapped in a British military parachute.

He was named for his grandfather.

After World War II the family moved to Osijek, where another son, Darko David, was born.

Imre Schlessinger once made a joke at the expense of Tito and was sentenced to several months in jail.

The family moved to Israel in 1948.

Schlessinger served his compulsory military service with the Golani Brigade and was commissioned an officer.

As part of his reserve duty he participated in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War.

Schlessinger received his BSc degree in Chemistry and Physics in 1968 (magna cum laude), and an MSc degree in chemistry (also magna cum laude) in 1970 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Schlessinger is the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Michael Landau Prize (1973), the Sara Leady Prize (1980), the Hestrin Prize (1983), the Levinson Prize (1984), a Ciba-Drew Award (1995), the Antoine Lacassagne Prize (1995), the Taylor Prize (2000), and the Dan David Prize (2006).

He obtained his PhD degree in biophysics from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974.

From 1974 to 1976, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Departments of Chemistry and Applied Physics at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, working with Watt W. Webb, among others.

From 1977 to 1978, he was a visiting fellow in the immunology branch of the National Cancer Institute.

He is married to Irit Lax, also a professor in the pharmacology department at Yale.

They each have two children by previous marriages.

Schlessinger was a member of the faculty of the Weizmann Institute from 1978 to 1991 and was the Ruth and Leonard Simon Professor of Cancer Research in the department of immunology from 1985 to 1991.

In addition, he was a research director for Rorer Biotechnology in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, from 1985 to 1990.

In 1990, he was appointed as the Milton and Helen Kimmelman Professor and chairman of the department of pharmacology at the New York University School of Medicine.

He has lectured at many institutions, including the Harvey Society (in the 1993–1994 Harvey Lectures series) and the 2006 Keith R. Porter Lecture of the American Society for Cell Biology.

He served as director of NYU Medical Center's Skirball Institute for Biomolecular Medicine, from 1998 to 2001.

He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2000, to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and to the Institute of Medicine in 2005.

He is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including Cell, Molecular Cell, the Journal of Cell Biology, and the Science magazine Science Signaling.

He has been the William H. Prusoff Professor and chairman of the department of pharmacology at Yale School of Medicine since 2001.

In 2002, he was granted an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa.

In September 2003, The Guardian listed him as number 14 in the "Giants of Science".

In a 2009 interview with a Croatian daily newspaper Jutarnji list, he said, "Basically I am atheist. I grew up Jewish and I truly belong to the Jewish culture, but I'm not a follower of any world religion. Religion does not interest me at all."

In 2009, he was elected as a Member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

In 2009, Schlessinger was given an award by then-President of Croatia Stjepan Mesić for outstanding service in promoting Croatia in the international scientific community and for the contribution within Croatian biomedical sciences.

In 2012, the Hope Funds for Cancer Research selected Schlessinger to receive its Award of Excellence for Clinical Development.

He received, along with Charles Sawyers and Tony Hunter, the 2014 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Biomedicine category for "carving out the path that led to the development of a new class of successful cancer drugs."

According to PubMed, Schlessinger has authored over 450 scientific original and review articles in the areas of pharmacology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and structural biology, mostly on tyrosine kinase signaling.

Tyrosine kinase signaling plays a critical role in the control of many cellular processes including cell proliferation, differentiation, metabolism, as well as cell survival and migration.

Tyrosine kinases play a particularly important role in cancer, and several agents that block their activity are now used as anti-cancer drugs, such as Imatinib or Gleevec.