In the spring of 2002, Millikin University will award an honorary degree to respected
professor Dr. Guido Guidotti '54 of Newton, Mass. He is the Higgins professor of
biochemistry at Harvard University, where he began teaching in 1963.
Guidotti was born
in Florence, Italy, and grew up in Naples. He came to Decatur in 1950 as Decatur
High School's first American Field Service student. Millikin University offered him a scholarship to
attend college once he finished high school, and he entered as a sophomore in
the fall of 1951.He attended Millikin for two years, and then transferred to
Washington University in St. Louis in a special program where selected students
could enter directly into medical school beginning with their senior year of
college.
"Decatur and the Midwest were very different from Naples, Italy, in 1950.
The university was less formal than in Italy. I enjoyed the science classes:
organic chemistry, physical chemistry, embryology, physics and optics."
After completing his M.D. in 1957, Guidotti served his internship and
residency at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. In 1963 he earned a Ph.D. at the
Rockefeller Institute in New York. He was then hired to teach and conduct
research at Harvard, where he has now been for nearly 40 years..
Guidotti’s
research is focused on the function and regulation of membrane proteins involved
in the transfer of solutes and of information across the plasma membrane. The
National Library of Medicine lists 131 scholarly articles published by Guidotti,
including eight in 2001. He considers teaching and
supervision of graduate students among the most rewarding of his
responsibilities. Based upon nomination by students, Guidotti won Harvard’s
Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2000.
