Prof. Tony Pawson Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mt. Sinai Hospital, Canada

Tony Pawson was an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, England (1970-1973), and obtained his PhD with Dr. Alan Smith at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, University of London, working on retroviral gene expression. He undertook postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley (1976-1980), where he identified a... read morevariety of retroviral oncogene products. He then moved to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver as an Assistant Professor in 1981, and then to the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mt. Sinai Hospital, University of Toronto, in 1985. During his career he explored the mechanisms through which modular protein-protein interactions control intracellular signaling pathways, and provide a general architecture for organizing cell regulatory systems, building on his identification of the SH2 domain in 1985. His discoveries in signal transduction have been extremely valuable in the field of cancer research. He became a University Professor of the University of Toronto, Director of Research at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mt. Sinai Hospital, and a Distinguished Scientist of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. In 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Canada, he was also a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (US), and an Associate Member of EMBO. He was awarded many prizes for his discoveries, including the Gairdner Award in 1994 and the Wolf Prize in 2005. In 2008 he became the first Canadian scientist to receive the so-called “Japanese Nobel”, the Kyoto Prize. Pawson was appointed CH in 2006 and to the Order of Canada in 2000. Pawson died on August 7 2013, he is survived by a daughter, a son and a stepson.