Frederick W. Alt is an American geneticist. He is a member of the Immunology section of the National Academy of Sciences and a Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of GeneticsatHarvard Medical School.[1] He is the Director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital.[2] He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, since 1987.
Frederick Alt
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| Other names | Fred Alt |
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| Doctoral students | Karen M. Frank |
Alt completed his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University, graduating in 1971.[3] He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University in 1977 while under the research direction of Robert Schimke. He performed his postdoctoral work in David Baltimore's laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).[4] From 1982 to 1991 he was on the faculty at Columbia University and then moved to Harvard Medical School.[5]
Alt's research interest is in maintenance of genome stability in cells of the mammalian immunological system, particularly antigen receptor variable region gene assembly in developing B and T lymphocytes, immunoglobulin heavy chain class switch recombination (CSR), and somatic hypermutation in activated mature B lymphocytes.[1]
Alt is the son-in-law of organic chemist Koji Nakanishi, former Centennial Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Chemistry Department at Columbia University.[6]
Alt is also the father of the chef and food writer J. Kenji López-Alt.[7]
He has received many awards, this is a select list:
The Cancer Research Institute of New York gives an annual prize in his honor, the Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology.
Alt is a member of:
His father, Frederick Alt, is a professor at Harvard Medical School