Impact
Richard Morimoto studies cell stress regulatory pathways and protein homeostasis (proteostasis), the systems that keep the proteome stable under stress and in the presence of misfolded and aggregation-prone proteins. His laboratory at Northwestern University uses C. elegans and human iPS cells, together with genetic, molecular, small-molecule, proteomic and genomic methods, to identify how these pathways change during ageing and in age-associated diseases, including neurodegeneration, metabolic disease and cancer. Work from his group has described transcellular chaperone signalling that coordinates proteostasis across tissues, and found that repression of the heat shock response in C. elegans is a programmed event at the onset of reproduction. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 1982 and has served as department chair, Dean of The Graduate School and Associate Provost. He was a founder of Proteostasis Therapeutics, a company formed to develop small-molecule treatments for diseases of protein homeostasis. His honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and MERIT awards from the NIGMS and the National Institute on Aging.
Metrics
- h-index 146 · google scholar as of 2026-09-23 source ↗
Research output
416 works · 61,685 citations · h-index 124 OpenAlex ↗
Selected publications
- Geroscience: Linking Aging to Chronic Disease ↗ 2014 · 2,844 citations
- Adapting Proteostasis for Disease Intervention ↗ 2008 · 2,557 citations
- Regulation of the heat shock transcriptional response: cross talk between a family of heat shock factors, molecular chaperones, and negative regulators ↗ 1998 · 1,934 citations
- The Biology of Proteostasis in Aging and Disease ↗ 2015 · 1,542 citations
- Heat-shock protein 70 inhibits apoptosis by preventing recruitment of procaspase-9 to the Apaf-1 apoptosome ↗ 2000 · 1,519 citations
Research funding
43 NIH awards · USD 31M total NIH RePORTER ↗
- Regulation of Peripheral Proteostasis National Institute on Aging · 2017 · USD 3M
- Proteostasis in Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease National Institute on Aging · 2021 · USD 3M
- Proteostasis in Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease National Institute on Aging · 2022 · USD 3M
- Proteostasis in Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease National Institute on Aging · 2018 · USD 3M
- Proteostasis in Aging and Neurodegenerative Disease National Institute on Aging · 2019 · USD 3M