The son of Israel Gelfand. Before coming to Northwestern University in 2005, Vladimir I. Gelfand, PhD, D Sc, Leslie B. Arey Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine Department of Cell & Developmental Biology, spent more than two decades studying cell biology in his native Russia and more than a decade as a professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Gelfand now serves on the editorial board for several journals, including Cel Motility and the Cytoskeleton and The FASEB Journal - the journal of the federation of American societies for experimental biology - and haspublished numerouspapers in publications such as Nature, The Journal of Cell Biology and Science. Gelfand's re- search is currently supported by two NIH-funded grants. The focus of research in his lab is on mechanisms of intracellular transport and cytoskeleton dynamics. In particular, he is interested in microtubule motors- proteins that move cargo along microtubule tracks and play a key role in the organization of cytoplasm in every cell. Microtubules and microtubule motors are involved in cell division, secretion, endocytosis and transport of every organellein the cytoplasm. Mutations in genes en- coding motor proteins are often lethal, and in caseswhen they arenot lethal they lead to a number of neurodegenerative and other diseases.