Gerald D. Fischbach

Gerald D. Fischbach, M.D., is Chairman of the Council on Biomedical Research and Development at The New York Academy of Medicine. Dr. Fischbach is Executive Vice President for Health and Biomedical Sciences, Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences, and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University.

Dr. Fischbach received his M.D. degree in 1965 from Cornell University Medical School and interned at the University of Washington Hospital. He began his research career at the National Institutes of Health, serving from 1966-1973. He subsequently served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, first as Associate Professor of Pharmacology from 1973-1978 and then as Professor until 1981. From 1981-1990, Dr. Fischbach was the Edison Professor of Neurobiology and Head of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology at Washington University School of Medicine. In 1990, he returned to Harvard Medical School where he was the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology and Chairman of the Neurobiology Departments of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital until 1998. He served as Director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health from 1998-2001.

Dr. Fischbach is a past president of the Society of Neuroscience and he now serves on several medical and scientific advisory boards. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, and he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a non-resident Fellow of the Salk Institute.

Throughout his career, Dr. Fischbach has studied the formation and maintenance of synapses, which are the junctions between nerve cells and their targets through which information is transferred. He has been particularly interested in the neuromuscular junction, a synapse that is easily accessible to experimental manipulation. He pioneered the use of cultured neurons and muscle cells to characterize the biochemical, cellular, and electrophysiological mechanisms underlying development and function of the neuromuscular junction. Beginning in the 1970's, Dr. Fischbach embarked on a search for molecules released by motor neurons that regulate the number of acetylcholine receptors on muscle cells. This work culminated in 1993 with the purification and cloning of a protein called ARIA (for acetylcholine receptor-inducing activity) that stimulates synthesis of acetylcholine receptors by skeletal muscle cells. This molecule is now known to be a member of a family of trophic factors called neuregulins that are thought to be involved in a variety of important developmental processes in the nervous system. Because ARIA and other neuregulins act by binding to tyrosine kinase receptors on target cells, Dr. Fischbach's work was key in demonstrating that synaptic development relies upon biochemical mechanisms that are broadly similar to those that underlie the action of nerve growth factor and other well known trophic molecules. His current research focus is on trophic factors that influence synaptic efficacy and nerve cell survival.

Contact information: (212) 305-2752; gf224@columbia.edu.

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