Fred Ramsdell

Early life and education Ramsdell was born on December 4, 1960, in Elmhurst, Illinois. Ramsdell initially attended Foothill College because he could not afford a four-year UC education, before transferring to University of California, San Diego. He received a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in biochemistry and cell biology from UCSD in 1983. In the same year, he enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, as a doctoral student, and studied microbiology and immunology under the mentorship of Sidney Golub, receiving his PhD in 1987.

Career Ramsdell qualified for food stamps as a graduate student when he began his fellowship at the National Institutes of Health for postgraduate training after earning his PhD. In 1994, he joined the Bothell, Washington-based biotechnology company Darwin Molecular (along with Mary E. Brunkow), where he established an immunology program. Darwin Molecular was acquired by Chiroscience in 1996. Three years later, Chiroscience merged with Celltech (briefly under the name Celltech Chiroscience). In 2004, Ramsdell and Brunkow left the company.

He joined ZymoGenetics in 2004 where he led research teams focusing on novel proteins with potential regulatory activity in lymphoid cells. In 2008, he started working at Novo Nordisk where he helped establish the firm's Inflammation Research Center in Seattle and became leader of the immunobiology group. where he held the role of chief scientific officer. As of 2025, he is the chair of the company's scientific advisory board.

Research

In the 1990s, while working at Celltech in Bothell, Washington, Ramsdell and Brunkow studied a strain of mice, called scurfy, characterized by serious autoimmune disease, setting out to identify the mutation responsible for the phenotype. After establishing a candidate region on the X chromosome containing approximately 20 potential genes, they identified an insertion of two base pairs in a previously unknown gene, which they named Foxp3. In 2001, in collaboration with Hans D. Ochs, Robert Wildin, and their teams, Ramsdell and Brunkow demonstrated that mutations in the human FOXP3 gene are found in IPEX syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease.

Honors and awards In 2017, Ramsdell received, jointly with Shimon Sakaguchi and Alexander Rudensky, the Crafoord Prize for research in polyarthritis. They were cited for "their discoveries relating to regulatory T cells, which counteract harmful immune reactions in arthritis and other autoimmune diseases".

Ramsdell was jointly awarded, with Sakaguchi and Mary E. Brunkow, the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ramsdell later told the BBC that his first response when he did learn the news from his wife was "I did not!", to which she replied that she had 200 text messages suggesting otherwise. When in Sweden to receive the award, Ramsdell donated the hiking boots he was wearing when he found out he had won the Prize to the Nobel Prize Museum.