David Russell

Biography

 David W. Russell received a BA degree in biology from UT Austin in 1975 and a PhD in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1980. He was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow from 1980-1982 with Nobel laureate Dr. Michael Smith (Chemistry, 1993) at the University of British Columbia. He joined the faculty at UT Southwestern in 1982, was promoted to professor in 1990, and received the McDermott Distinguished Chair of Molecular Genetics in 1992.

Research Interest

 Dr. Russell’s research interests are in lipid metabolism, in particular the enzymatic pathways that dispose of cholesterol. His laboratory has isolated over a dozen genes that encode enzymes involved in cholesterol breakdown, and has identified the molecular bases of six human genetic diseases characterized by abnormal cholesterol and lipid metabolism. Dr. Russell and Dr. Joseph Sambrook are the authors of the best selling molecular biology cloning manual, Molecular Cloning, published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press