Brian Kobilka

Brian Kobilka (born 1955) is an American physiologist who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He went to school in Little Falls, Minnesota, earned a bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry at the University of Minnesota Duluth and an MD at Yale University School of Medicine, completed a residency in internal medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow under Lefkowitz at Duke University, where he began cloning the beta-2 adrenergic receptor. He moved to Stanford in 1989 and is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His laboratory determined the molecular structure of the beta-2 adrenergic receptor, a notoriously difficult target for X-ray crystallography, and he co-founded the biotechnology company ConfometRx.