1995 Outstanding Contributions to Clinical Chemistry in a Selected Area of Research
John J. Albers received the 23rd annual award, sponsored by Roche Diagnostic Systems.
Albers has held the position of research professor of medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, since 1982. He also holds the position of adjunct research professor of pathology and director of Northwest Lipid Research Laboratories, University of Washington, and directs a multi-disciplinary program project on human lipoprotein pathophysiology. The Northwest Lipid Research Laboratories is an internationally recognized research facility devoted to the measurement of lipids and apolipoproteins, and to the study of the role of lipid–protein complexes or lipoproteins in the development of atherosclerosis and heart disease.
Albers’ career with the University of Washington spans nearly 25 years. Beginning in 1971 he was laboratory director of the Northwest Lipid Research Clinic at Harborview Medical Center, a position he held for 10 years. In 1990 his laboratory moved to entirely new facilities within the University of Washington, where he is director of the Northwest Lipid Research Laboratories. His educational background includes a B.A. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from the University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago. His 2-year US Public Health Service postdoctoral fellowship was divided between the University of Chicago and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. As an undergraduate he was the recipient of an Evans Scholars Scholarship and studied aeronautical engineering prior to pursuing the biological sciences. He was an Established Investigator of the American Heart Association from 1979 to 1984 and in 1980 received the Irving H. Page Award for Young Investigators from the Council on Arteriosclerosis, American Heart Association.
Albers is author and co-author of over 300 technical publications in the areas of lipids, lipoprotein metabolism, atherosclerosis, and coronary heart disease. He has also edited two volumes in Methods in Enzymology on plasma lipoproteins. He was the first to develop quantitative methods for lipoprotein(a) and the enzyme lecithin-cholesterol acyltransferase and has published extensively on methods for measurement of high-density lipoproteins and apolipoproteins. A major focus of Albers’ present research is on the structure, gene organization, and function of the proteins of lipid transport. He has served as associate editor of Clinical Chemistry since 1993 and is on the editorial boards of Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology and the Journal of Lipid Research. Previously he has served on the editorial board of Analytical Biochemistry.
Albers has held a number of national and international responsibilities, including chairman of the Laboratory Methods Committee for the Lipid Research Clinics Program; member of the Arteriosclerosis, Hypertension and Lipid Metabolism Advisory Committee of the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute, National Institutes of Health; and member of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry Committee on Apolipoproteins.