raul-padron.org
"CURIOSITY-DRIVEN RESEARCH RULES"

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Dr. Raúl Padrón, PhD in Physiology and Biophysics of IVIC (1979), is Professor at the Department of Radiology, Division of Cell Biology and Imaging, University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A. and Senior Emeritus Investigator at the Center of Structural Biology (CBE) of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research (IVIC) in Caracas, Venezuela, where he started his scientifc career as visiting student in 1966. After his postdoctoral work with Hugh E. Huxley at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge, UK) (supported by the Alberto Vollmer Foundation)  he founded the Deparment of Structural Biology of IVIC in 1997, where he was an International Research Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) from 1997 until 2011. He has devoted his career to the study of the structure and function of the myosin thick filaments of skeletal, cardiac and smooth muscle and the myosin interacting-head motif (IHM) structure and function, with their implications on the muscle relaxed state, super-relaxation, thick filament activation and human muscle diseases like hypertrophic and dilated cardiomyopathy. His honors includes: Polar Prize ("Lorenzo Mendoza Fleury" Prize) (1991) of Fundación Empresas Polar (FEP); CONICIT Biology Prizes (1989, 1990, 1996); FONACIT Biology Prize (2005); and the National Prize in Science and Technology of Venezuela (2008). He is an elected member of the Latin-American Academy of Sciences (ACAL) (2002), and The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) (2004),  and an elected foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A (2018) (see note in Spanish here).