Dr. Phyllis Hanson Honored with Katz Award for Endocytosis and Exocytosis Research
Kerry Larkin
We are excited to share that Dr. Phyllis Hanson, a former postdoctoral fellow in Yale’s Cell Biology Department, was recently awarded the 2026 Sir Bernard Katz Award for Research in Endocytosis and Exocytosis. Sponsored by the Membrane Fusion, Fission, and Traffic Subgroup of the Biophysical Society, the annual award honors an investigator who has made significant contributions to the fields of endocytosis and exocytosis: two critical processes for transporting materials across the cell’s outer membrane through membrane remodeling.
The Katz Award is named for Sir Bernard Katz, whose research into endocytosis and exocytosis revolutionized molecular neuroscience by unveiling how neurons transmit messages. Katz’ discovery that neurotransmitters are released through exocytosis earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1970. The Katz award honors researchers who have moved the fields of endocytosis and exocytosis forward through expanding our fundamental understanding of membrane remodeling and trafficking mechanisms and how they impact human health.
Dr. Hanson, the Minor J. Coon Collegiate Professor of Biological Chemistry and the Chair of Department of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan, has built upon Katz’ work through her research on membrane fusion and structure. Dr. Hanson earned her B.A. in Molecular Biophysics at Yale University before going on to earn her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. She then returned to Yale’s Cell Biology Department for her postdoctoral work with Dr. Reinhard Jahn, where she began her research on membrane trafficking.
Throughout Dr. Hanson’s research trajectory, extending through her independent career at the Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Michigan, she has established herself as a leader in advancing the fields of membrane structure and remodeling. Dr. Yongli Zhang, chair of the Biophysical Society’s Membrane Fusion, Fission, and Traffic Subgroup, describes Dr. Hanson as having the ability to “pinpoint the central question and resolve it with striking clarity and rigor”. Her early work on the role of SNARE proteins is a key example of her contributions to the fundamental understanding of membrane fusion mechanisms that underpin cellular organization.
SNAREs are important players for vesicle trafficking in the cell, including neurotransmitter release, as they help vesicles recognize and dock on the proper acceptor membranes. Neurotransmitters are packaged into presynaptic vesicles that must fuse with the plasma membrane to release the contents across the synapse to the neighboring neuron through exocytosis. Previously, researchers accepted that the SNAREs between the vesicles and plasma membrane formed a complex when the vesicle docked at the membrane, and that their subsequent disassembly promoted fusion between the membranes. This hypothesis rested on the assumption that SNAREs between the different membranes arranged in an antiparallel arrangement to form a complex that bridged the membranes together. However, in 1997 Dr. Hanson was among the first to show through structural experiments that the SNAREs instead arranged in a parallel fashion in the complex. This work shifted the field to suggest that SNARE complex formation itself could promote membrane fusion by bringing the membranes into close proximity through the parallel arrangement. This mechanism is remarkably similar to how viruses coopt membrane fusion pathways, thus providing novel connections between the fields of basic cell biology, neuroscience, and virology.
Later in her career, Dr. Hanson continued to expand our understanding of the proteins involved in membrane remodeling. She and her colleagues extended the known mechanistic roles for the ESCRT (Endosomal Sorting Complexes Required for Transport) protein complexes. While the ESCRTs were originally appreciated for their role in remodeling membranes to produce budding vesicles, Dr. Hanson’s work has implicated the ESCRTS in additional roles in organelle membrane repair and quality control mechanisms. Recently, the Hanson lab demonstrated how ESCRTs respond to membrane damage in the endolysosomal pathway after pathogen entry into the cell, thus providing new insights into the cell’s response to bacterial and viral infections.
In addition to her research, Dr. Hanson was an associate editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and she serves as a member of the American Society for Cell Biology, the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has also served as the chair of the NIH Synapses, Cytoskeleton, and Trafficking Study Section and the Membrane Biology and Protein Processing Study Section. As the 2026 Katz Award Recipient, Dr. Hanson will deliver the keynote address at the Membrane Fusion, Fission, and Traffic Subgroup’s Annual Symposium on February 21st, 2026 in San Francisco.