Dr. Michael Caplan is the New C.N.H. Long Professor

Dr. Michael J. Caplan, newly designated as the C.N.H. Long Professor of Physiology, is renowned for his research on the sorting and function of ion proteins in polarized epithelial cells.

His laboratory team focuses on identifying the proteins that interact with ion transporters to determine their localization and trafficking properties. It also studies polycystic kidney disease and the unique trafficking processes that govern the distributions of the proteins encoded by the genes associated with this condition.

In one of his studies with researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Caplan and the other scientists discovered that curcumin, a compound in the spice tumeric, corrects the defect of cystic fibrosis in mice.

Caplan, a graduate of Harvard University, began his teaching career at Yale after earning his M.D and Ph.D. at the School of Medicine in 1987 and serving for two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology. He became an assistant professor in that department in 1988 and was promoted to a full professorship in 1998. Since 2001 he has held a secondary appointment in the Department of Cell Biology. He is currently the interim chair of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology.

Caplan has been honored with numerous awards for his scientific contributions, including the Yale School of Medicine’s Charles W. Bohmfalk Teaching Prize, a Neurex Young Investigator Award of the Renal Section of the American Physiological Society, a Young Investigator Award of the American Society of Nephrology and the American Heart Association, and a National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award, among others.

An associate editor of the journal Physiology, Caplan is on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals, including the American Journal of Physiology: Renal Physiology, the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, and Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry. He serves on the scientific advisory board of Telethon Italia.

Caplan is a member of the American Society for Cell Biology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Nephrology and the American Physiological Society.