2007 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science John E. Heuser (born August 29, 1942) is an American Professor of Biophysics in the department of Cell Biology and Physiology at the Washington University School of Medicine[1] as well as a Professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) at Kyoto University.

Currently Heuser has patents pending on Washington University's behalf for even more advanced versions of his quick-freezing machines.

Heuser graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Medical School in 1969 and joined the Washington University faculty as a professor of biophysics in 1980.

Currently, we use "quick-freezing" to capture several different cellular processes that are unusually fleeting, including membrane budding and fusion, synaptic vesicle discharge during neural transmission, movement of cilia and flagella on vertebrate and protozoal cells, and muscle contraction.

We also use "deep-etching" to visualize molecules adsorbed to inert substrates in order to study mechanisms of macromolecular assembly and disassembly in various processes, including remodeling of cytoskeletons, clathrin-mediated endocytosis, cell-to-cell recognition, and the formation of extracellular matrices.