| Ernest Marshall Wright | |
| Birth Date: | 1940 |
| Birth Place: | Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom |
| Field: | Physiology |
| Work Institution: | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Alma Mater: | University of London, University of Sheffield |
| Doctoral Advisor: | David Smyth FRS |
| Academic Advisors: | Arthur K. Solomon |
| Known For: | characterization of glucose and sodium co-transporters in cell membranes |
| Prizes: | Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Biophysical Society, Member of the National Academy of Sciences |
Ernest Marshall Wright FRS (born 1940) is an Irish-born American physiologist.[1] He is primarily known for his work on the mechanisms of glucose-sodium co-transporters in intestinal and other tissues in humans and animals.[2]
Ernest M. Wright was born in 1940 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He received his bachelors degree in physiology and chemistry at the University of London in 1961, and his Ph.D. in physiology in 1964 after studies in the laboratory of David Smyth FRS at the University of Sheffield.[3] He became a member of the faculty at Sheffield, and two years later received a Fellowship at Harvard where he studied with Jared Diamond and Stanley Schultz in the Biophysics Laboratory headed by Arthur K. Solomon. In 1978 he was awarded a D.Sc. in Physiology from the University of London.
Wright joined faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1967. While on the faculty of UCLA College of Medicine he distinguished himself as a leading researcher in glucose transporters in a wide variety of tissues. His work is the foundation of research leading to medical treatments for diabetes and obesity. Wright received the Senator Jacob K. Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health from 1985 to 1992, and was named the Walter Bradford Cannon Distinguished Lecturer by the American Physiological Society in 1989. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005 and a Fellow of the Biophysical Society that same year.