SBS Achievement Award
Marc G. Caron
James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology
Duke University Medical Center

SBS supports an award of $5000, presented at least every three years, to recognize outstanding achievements in research, innovation, ground-breaking foundation or seminal contributions that have proven to be broadly applicable to biomolecular screening or pharmaceutical/agricultural lead discovery.

Marc G. Caron has been a member of the Duke University Medical Center faculty since 1977. In 1998, he was named James B. Duke Professor of Cell Biology. From 1992 to 2004, he was also an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His major research interests have been in the mechanisms and regulation of G-protein-coupled receptors and, more recently, the mechanisms of neurotransmission as controlled by neurotransmitter transporters.

Over the past 25 years, Dr. Caron has chaired and organized several scientific meetings, including Gordon and FASEB conferences. He also developed and established a research program on the neurobiology of dopamine receptors and monoamine transporters, which has been funded by NIH for more than 22 years.

Dr. Caron has also received numerous awards. In 1994, he was awarded the DuPont Prize for Receptor Research for his contributions to the field. He also received a five-year Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Neuroscience Grant. In 1993, he served as a jury member of the prestigious Belgium Francqui Prize. In 1991, he was awarded a Javits Neuroscience Investigators Award.

Dr. Caron is a member of numerous scientific societies and has served on the editorial board of many journals. From 1992 to 2002 he was Associate Editor and Editor-in-Chief of Endocrine Reviews and Associate Editor of Biochemistry.

He has also served on the scientific advisory board of several pharmaceutical companies. In 1999, he founded Norak Biosciences, the biotechnology company that developed Transfluor technology based on discoveries in the Caron laboratory. Norak's mission is to discover drugs that will target G-protein-coupled receptor regulatory mechanisms.

Dr. Caron is a native of Quebec, where he obtained his undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Laval University. He went on to earn a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Miami, where he worked with Drs. Kenneth Savard and John Marsh on the regulation of steroidogeneisis and the cholesterol slide-chain cleavage enzyme in the corpus luteum.

After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, he returned to Laval University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physiology. In 1977, he joined the faculty of Duke University Medical Center, where he has been since.