Biography

David E. Clapham is the Aldo R. Castañeda Professor of Cardiovascular Research and Professor of Neurobiology at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School (Emeritus). He is currently a Senior Group Leader at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus. He earned his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his MD and PhD degrees from Emory University School of Medicine. During his residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, he was a Fulbright fellow with Nobelist Erwin Neher at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. As a member of Cardiology at BWH, he became an Assistant Professor in the Medicine and Physiology departments at Harvard Medical School. Between 1987 and 1997, he was a basic science faculty member at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Between 1997 and 2016 he was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Director of Cardiovascular Research at Children’s Hospital of Boston, and Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. From 2016 - 2022 he has was Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a group leader at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus. He is now a Senior Group Leader at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, USA.
Dr. Clapham’s research centers on ion channels.
Dr. Clapham has received the American Heart Association Basic Science Prize, the Cole Award from the Biophysical Society, the ASCI Award for Research and Contributions to the Biomedical Community, and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Discovery. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Medicine. In 2013 he received the Harvard Medical School William Silen Lifetime Achievement in Mentoring Award.