Alan Hall (1952–2015)

Alan Hall Alan Hall was known throughout the world as the founder of the Rho GTPase signaling field, which has had a huge impact on many areas of research, from animal and plant development to cancer progression. He sadly died suddenly of a heart attack while out jogging in New York City on May 3, 2015. He was 62 and seemed fit and well. He was very active in his research, as well as in his new role as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Cell Biology. Alan was born in Yorkshire in the UK in 1952. He studied chemistry at the University of Oxford, taking a few courses in biochemistry. He started his PhD studies there in chemistry but soon moved to Boston with his PhD supervisor Jeremy Knowles, graduating in 1977. Alan moved back to the UK and then to Switzerland for two short postdocs, during which he learned the techniques of molecular biology. He was recruited as a young group leader to the Institute of Cancer Research in London in 1981 by then Director, Robin Weiss. There, he started working with Chris Marshall on a long and productive collaboration. Together, they discovered and cloned the third Ras oncogene, N-Ras. They published a series of highly influential papers characterizing the biochemical properties and cellular functions of N-Ras. In the late 1980s, Alan turned his attention to the Rho cDNAs that Chris had obtained but were sitting untouched in a freezer. Alan combined his chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology, and newly developed cell biology skills to study Rho family proteins. He published his first paper on Rho, showing that Rho induced cell shape changes, in 1990. This opened up a whole new field of research. When I arrived in his laboratory in 1990, this was a field ripe for growth. It was a really exciting time at the Institute of Cancer Research. Chris Marshall’s laboratory was identifying kinases downstream of Ras. Alan purified and characterized the first RhoGAP and realized that it had homology to a region of Bcr, which is fused to Abl in leukemias. This led to the identification of a huge family of Rho GAPs. We worked together to demonstrate that Rho and Rac were essential for extracellular signals to induce changes to the actin cytoskeleton and to coordinate cell migration. In 1993, Alan moved to the newly formed MRC Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology (LMCB) at University College London, which was started up by Colin Hopkins. He took over as head of the LMCB in 2001. Having convinced the MRC to give a lot more money to the LMCB, he hired excellent young group leaders, increased the PhD program size, and bought a top-class coffee machine. He created a strong and successful institute and balanced this admirably with a highly productive laboratory. At the LMCB, he recruited andworkedwith a series of excellent postdocs. For example, he worked with Kate Nobes to determine the function of Cdc42 in inducing filopodia, with Emmanuelle Caron to describe the roles of Rho GTPases in different types of phagocytosis, and with Sandrine Etienne-Manneville to show how Cdc42 and the Par polarity complex regulated polarized cell migration. Alan also wrote a series of influential and insightful reviews on Rho GTPase signaling with members of his laboratory. Alan’s talents were spotted by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and the London community sadly bid him farewell in 2006, when he moved to Sloan-Kettering as Chair of the Cell Biology Program. He expanded the cell biology program by recruiting several excellent new team leaders, leaving a