William C. Sessa, newly designated as the Alfred Gilman Professor of Pharmacology, is an expert on blood vessel function and vascular disease.
His research focuses on the vascular endothelium, which lines all the blood vessels found in organisms and is the largest endocrine organ in the body. His laboratory is investigating etiologic factors or genes that cause a dysregulation of the endothelium and contribute to cardiovascular and other diseases. He is also using proteomics to discover novel proteins that may regulate blood vessel function, and is investigating blood vessel structure and function in physiology and disease, including the vascular mechanisms of atherosclerosis. He has authored or co-authored more than 200 research articles or papers.
Sessa joined the Yale faculty in 1993 as an assistant professor of pharmacology after post-doctoral work at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center, School of Medicine. He earned his Ph.D. at New York Medical College and was a postdoctoral fellow and senior scientist at the William Harvey Research Institute at St. Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College in London.
At Yale, where he has been a full professor since 1999, Sessa is the director of the Interdepartmental Program in Vascular Cell Signaling and Therapeutics and is vice chair in the Department of Pharmacology. Sessa is also the divisional director of Biological Sciences at Yale and is affiliated with the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Program, the Yale Cancer Center, the Diabetes Endocrinology Center, the Liver Center and more.
Sessa's numerous honors include the American Heart Association's Established Investigator Award, the Young Alumnus Award from the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy & Sciences, the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics' John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology, a MERIT Award from the National Institutes of Health and the The Robert Berne Award from the American Physiological Society. He is also a recipient of the William Harvey Medal. He has served on numerous editorial and scientific advisory boards, and has been invited lecturer at universities and research institutes throughout the United States, in Latin America and in Europe.