Ralph A. Bradshaw is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to that he was on the faculty of the Department of Biological Chemistry, Washington University, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Chemistry, University of California Irvine. He presently is Professor of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. He served as president of FASEB, was the founding president of the Protein Society and was the treasurer of the ASBMB. He was the founding editor of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics. His research has focused on protein chemistry and proteomics, with emphasis on the structure and function of growth factors and their receptors, particularly nerve growth factor and ?broblast growth factor, and the involvement of receptor tyrosine kinases in cell signaling. He has also studied the role of proteolytic processing and N-terminal modi?cation in protein stability and turnover.