Fred Ramsdell

Frederick Jay Ramsdell is an American immunologist and Nobel Prize laureate, born in Elmhurst, Illinois, on December 4, 1960. After graduating from Homestead High School in California in 1979 he began at Foothill College because he could not afford a four-year university, then transferred to the University of California, San Diego, where he received a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and cell biology in 1983. He enrolled that year at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a doctoral student of microbiology and immunology under Sidney Golub and received his PhD in 1987. After postgraduate training on a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health he joined the biopharmaceutical company Immunex, working on T cell activation and tolerance. He later co-founded Sonoma Biotherapeutics, where he is an advisor, and in 2025 he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Mary E. Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi for work on peripheral tolerance.