Frederick Alt
Frederick W. Alt is an American geneticist. He is a member of the Immunology section of the National Academy of Sciences and a Charles A. Janeway Professor of Pediatrics, and Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. He is the Director of the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the Boston Children's Hospital. He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, since 1987. Career. Alt completed his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University, graduating in 1971. He then went on to earn a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University in 1977 while under the research direction of  Robert Schimke. He performed his postdoctoral work in David Baltimore's laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From 1982 to 1991 he was on the faculty at Columbia University and then moved to Harvard Medical School. Alt's research interest is in maintenance of genome stability in cells of the mammalian immunological system, particularly antigen receptor variable region gene assembly in developing B and T lymphocytes, immunoglobulin heavy chain class switch recombination (CSR), and somatic hypermutation in activated mature B lymphocytes. Personal life. Alt is the father of the chef and food writer, J. Kenji López-Alt. Awards, memberships  and honors. He has received many awards, this is a select list: The Cancer Research Institute of New York gives an annual prize in his honor, the Frederick W. Alt Award for New Discoveries in Immunology. Alt is a member of: