Ian Parker has just been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, a great honor for him and for our School and UCI. His official citation reads:
Ian Parker is distinguished for his elegant and innovative contributions to calcium signalling. Our understanding of how intracellular calcium waves are generated encompasses a remarkable and complex series of events: they are initiated by stochastic release from clusters of IP3 receptors, leading to a hierarchical recruitment of such clusters, which culminates in a ''catastrophic'' generation of a wave via a self-amplified calcium-induced release. This understanding has been derived almost entirely from Parker''s work, which includes path breaking exploitation of fluorescent microscopy using equipment of his own design and construction. Amongst more recent innovations is to image calcium influx through many individual plasma membrane channels at once by high-speed TIRF microscopy, thus taking the quantitative analysis of such channels into new dimensions.
