Robert Langridge is
Professor Emeritus of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
and of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. From 1992 to 1994 he was chairman of the Joint UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco Graduate Program in Bioengineering and founder and director of the UCSF Computer Graphics Laboratory from 1976 to 1994.
Dr. Langridge held a Guggenheim Fellowship as Visiting Professor of Computer Science
at Stanford University 1983-84, was elected Fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science in 1989, and to the Institute of
Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990.
Born in England in 1933, Robert Langridge received his B.Sc. in Physics
with First Class Honours in 1954 and his Ph.D in Crystallography in 1957
from the University of London. His dissertation was on X-Ray crystallographic,
model building and computational studies of the structure of DNA, including
the first application of a stored program digital computer (the IBM 650)
to the analysis of DNA structure. His research was supervised by Maurice
Wilkins (who shared the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick in 1962).
After coming to the United States in 1957 he held postdoctoral appointments
in Biophysics at Yale University (1957-59) and in Biology at MIT (1959-61).
In 1961 he set up a laboratory to study the structures of DNA and viruses
at the Children's Cancer Research Foundation, Boston, with faculty appointments
at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School. Concurrently, in 1964
he collaborated on the original work in molecular graphics at Project MAC
(now The Laboratory for Computer Science) at MIT. In 1966 he became Professor
of Biophysics at the University of Chicago and in 1968 moved to Princeton
University as Professor of Chemistry and of Biochemical Sciences. In 1969
he established the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Princeton as a National
Research Resource of the National Institutes of Health. In 1976 he moved
the facility to the University of California, San Francisco, and continued
as Director of the Laboratory until his retirement in 1994.
Dr Langridge served on the Computer and Biomathematics Research Study Section
of the National Institutes of Health (member 1968-72, chairman 1974-76),
the Science and Educational Advisory Committee at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories
(1988-92), the Computer Science & Telecommunications Board of the National
Research Council (1988-91), the Council of
the National Center for Research Resources of the National Institutes of
Health (1992-96), and in 1993-94 was the Council Representative on the Advisory
Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health.