Louis J. Ignarro was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1941. He received a B.Sc. in Chemistry and Pharmacy from Columbia University in 1962, a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Minnesota in 1966, and postdoctoral training in the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology at the NIH in 1966-1968. He had a research position with Ciba-Geigy from 1968 to 1972, an academic position in the Department of Pharmacology at Tulane University School of Medicine from 1973 to 1985, and an academic position in the Department of Pharmacology at UCLA School of Medicine since 1985. He was awarded a PhRMA Foundation (formerly PMA) Research Starter Grant in 1973 during his research years at Tulane University.

He currently holds the position of Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology at UCLA. Dr. Ignarro has been interested in signal transduction mechanisms involving cyclic GMP and nitric oxide for most of his career. He has published over 500 articles and has trained numerous graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and clinical fellows during his academic career. His research contributions include: elucidation of the mechanism of action of nitroglycerin, discovery that nitric oxide relaxes smooth muscle and inhibits platelet function, introduction of S-nitrosothiols into biology, discovery that EDRF is nitric oxide, and discovery that nitric oxide is the neurotransmitter that promotes erectile function. The latter finding led to the development of ViagraR.

Dr. Ignarro is a member of many professional societies and on the editorial board of many scientific journals. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards and other recognition for his basic research including “The Ciba Award for Hypertension Research”, “The Roussel Uclaf Prize”, The Basic Research Prize of The American Heart Association”, and “The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine” (1998).