James W. Prahl Memorial Award

He was an associate professor in the pathology department at the University of Utah School of Medicine where he was teaching and doing research on the complement system. A member of the National Institutes of Health Allergy and Immunology Study Section and the American Heart Association Immunology and Microbiology Research Study Committee, he also was an associate editor of the Journal of Immunology, an advisory editor of Immunochemistry {Molecular Immunology), and on the editorial board of Archives of Biochemistry.Biophysics. He was a member of several professional organizations including the American Association of Immunologists, the American Society of Biological Chemists, and the British Biochemical Society.

Dr. Prahl was born in New York City in 1931. He graduated from Princeton University cum laude in 1953 and received his MD in 1957 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Between an internship and residency in internal medicine at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, he served two years as a Senior Assistant Surgeon in the Public Health Service, Indian Health Service, New Mexico. Later, he enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biochemistry of the University of Washington School of Medicine. He received his PhD in 1964 under Hans Neurath and subsequently did postdoctoral research on the structure of immunoglobulins in the laboratory of Rodney Porter, St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, and on complement in the laboratory of Hans Miiller-Eberhard at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation. After working at the California Institute of Technology, he headed the Immunochemistry Section of the American Red Cross Blood Research Laboratory. During the following three years he organized a group active in the isolation and chemical characterization of several human complement proteins. He joined the faculty at the University of Utah in 1975.