Illustration of the US biochemist James E Rothman (born 1950). Rothman received a bachelors in physics from Yale University in 1971 and a PhD in biological chemistry from Harvard University in 1976. He has spent his career studying vesicles, cell organelles that transport substances around and between cells. He discovered a number of proteins that mediate the fusing of vesicles with membranes, leading to an understanding of the regulation of vesicle traffic. Rothamn shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Sudhof.