Dynamic Plasma Membranes: Portals Between Cells and Physiology

Vann Bennett was born April 21, 1948 in Morganton, North Carolina. He graduated from Stanford University (Phi Beta Kappa, in biological and chemical studies) in 1970. He earned his Ph.D for work on the mechanism of action of cholera toxin with Pedro Cuatrecasas in 1974, and his M.D. in 1976 from the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He completed postdoctoral training with Daniel Branton, at the Biological Laboratories, Harvard University, where he developed an assay for measuring reconstitution of spectrin with membrane sites. He was a Staff scientist at Burroughs Wellcome, 1977-1980, where he discovered ankyrin and its role in coupling the anion exchanger to the spectrin-based membrane skeleton. He was appointed Assistant professor, 1981-1983; Associate professor, 1983-1987; and Professor 1987 in the Department of Cell Biology, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. During this time he biochemically characterized spectrin and ankyrin for the first time from non-erythroid tissues, discovered with Peter Agre that spectrin deficiency is a common feature of hereditary spherocytosis, and discovered adducin and its role in recruiting spectrin to actin. He was appointed Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University Medical Center and Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1987, and now holds joint appointments in the Departments of Cell Biology and Neurobiology. While at Duke, he has cloned and characterized erythrocyte ankyrin, beta-2 spectrin, and adducin subunits, discovered ankyrin-G and its role in formation of axon initial segments, and ankyrin-B and its role in ankyrin-B syndrome due to ankyrin-B mutation in humans. He currently is the George Barth Geller Professor of Biochemistry and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His honors include Maryland's Outstanding Young Scientist Award, 1981 a Merit Award from NIH (1990-98), election to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars (2004), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), the

1. A Molecular Look at Membranes Max Berkowitz 2. Where Biology Meets Physics - A Converging View on Membrane Microdomain Dynamics Nicolas Destainville, Thomas H. Schmidt and Thorsten Lang 3. Plasma Membrane Repair in Health and Disease Alexis R. Demonbreun and Elizabeth M. McNally 4. Local Palmitoylation Cycles and Specialized Membrane Domain Organization Yuko Fukata, Tatsuro Murakami, Norihiko Yokoi and Masaki Fukata 5. An Adaptable Spectin/Ankyrin-Based Mechanism for Long-Range Organization of Plasma Membranes in Vertebrate Tissues Vann Bennett and Damaris N. Lorenzo 6. The Axon Initial Segment, Fifty Years Later: A Nexus for Neuronal Organization and Function Christophe Leterrier