His mother's parents, Raymond and Ida, grew up in a village in Bessarabia. He is former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and for- mer editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Welcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Sudhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking. Schekman is also a member of the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize. Work: The cells inside our bodies produce a host of different molecules that are sent to specific sites. During transport, many of thesemolecules are grouped together in tiny sac-like structures called vesicles. These vesicles help transport substances to different places inside the cell and send molecules from the cell's surface as signals to other cells in the body. During the 1970s, Randy Schekman studied yeast cells with malfunctions in this transportation system. He demonstrated that that the malfun- ctions were due to genetic defects and explained how different genes regulate different aspects of the transports.