John G. Hildebrand PhD

John Hildebrand is an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942 and grew up in Belmont, MA, where he had all of his precollege education in the town's public schools. By the time he graduated from high school in 1960 and entered Harvard College in Cambridge, MA, he had developed my two life passions: biology and classical music. Although he expected to major in music, he eventually settled on a major in biology.

By the time he received his Ph.D. degree in 1969, he had decided to join the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School for postdoctoral research training. In 1972, he accepted an appointment as an Assistant Professor in the same department, established his independent lab, and launched a program of research on the metamorphosis of the nervous system of the giant sphinx moth Manduca sexta. he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1977. In 1980 he moved to the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University in New York City, attracted by an invitation to help build a section devoted to developmental neurobiology.