Leonard Rome, PhD

Associate Director, California NanoSystems Institute

Leonard H. Rome, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Biological Chemistry and Associate Director of the California NanoSystems Institute. He served as the Senior Associate Dean for Research in the School of Medicine from 1997 to 2012. His laboratory research at UCLA centers on a novel cellular organelle called a “vault” which he and a former postdoc, Dr. Nancy Kedersha, discovered in 1986. Rome leads a team of interdisciplinary scientists affiliated with the CNSI who are engineering the vault particle as flexible nano-scale capsules for a wide variety of applications from drug delivery to vaccines to intercellular sensors. Dr. Rome earned his BS in Chemistry and MS and PhD in Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where he worked on lysosome biogenesis.