Bertil Hille

Dr. Bertil Hille is an American biologist. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Washington since 1968. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut on October 10, 1940. He attended the Foote School and received his B.S. summa cum laude in Zoology from Yale University (1962) and his Ph.D. in Life Sciences from The Rockefeller University (1967).

Dr. Hille is particularly well known for his research and expertise on cell signalling by ion channels. In addition to his significant research contributions, he is the author of several editions of Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes, widely described as the authoritative textbook on ion channels. This text is known for its clarity and precise language, for its attention to the history of neural membrane research, and for the breadth and depth of its scientific coverage.

Hille has received numerous awards, including co-recipient (with Rod MacKinnon and Clay Armstrong) of the 2001 Gairdner International Award (Canada) “for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science”; of the 1999 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (with Armstrong and MacKinnon) “for elucidating the functional and structural architecture of ion channel proteins”; and the 1996 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize at Columbia University (with Armstrong) for “exceptional accomplishments in biological and biochemical research”

Dr. Hille was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986, and to the Institute Of Medicine in 2002.

He is married to Merrill Burr Hille, a professor of Zoology at the University of Washington, and has two sons, Erik and Trygve.


 * Bertil Hille Ion channels of excitable membranes, 3rd ed., Sinauer Associates, Sunderland ,MA (2001). ISBN 0-87893-321-2