[6][7][8] He is known for his discovery, with Marc Kirschner, of dynamic instability in microtubules,[9][10] for studies of the mechanism of cell division, and for contributions to chemical biology.
He moved to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1979 for his PhD which was supervised by Marc Kirschner[12] and investigated the dynamic instability of microtubules.
[11] In 1997 he moved to Harvard University to become co-director of the Institute for Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School,[14] where he pioneered phenotype-based screening,[15] discovering the small molecule monastrol – the first small-molecule inhibitor of mitosis that does not target tubulin.
[27] He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2014[14] and delivered the Keith R. Porter Lecture in 2013.
[29] “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-11-11) This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.