James Heath's Biography

James Heath, Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology (CalTech)

Jim Heath is the Elizabeth Gilloon Professor and Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, and Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. He directs the National Cancer Institute funded NSB Cancer Center. He received his Ph.D. in 1988 from Rice University where he was the principle graduate student involved in the discovery of C60 and the fullerenes. He was a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley before joining the research staff at IBM Watson Labs in 1991. He took a faculty position at UCLA in 1994, and moved to Caltech in 2003. He has received the Irving Weinstein Award from the AACR and the Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences. He was named by Forbes in 2009 as one of the top 7 innovators in the world.