Vishva M. Dixit is presently Vice President of Early Discovery Research at Genentech Inc. He has made many contributions to biomedicine and his early work on cell death and inflammation is prominent in introductory textbooks of biology and medicine. He began his career as a physician in Kenya, trained as a Pathologist at Washington University, St. Louis, and was on faculty at University of Michigan. Dixit's pioneering studies defined the biochemical framework illuminating many of the key components of the cell death pathway. He identified numerous proteins in the cell death cascade and determined how they functioned at a molecular level. He is a Foreign Member, European Molecular Biology Organization, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.