Tony Bretscher is the Robert J. Appel Professor Emeritus of Cellular and Molecular Biology in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, and a member of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, serving as the Institute’s Associate Director from 2007-2012. After training as a physicist at the University of Cambridge, he obtained his Ph.D. in genetics in 1974 from the University of Leeds, studying gene regulation in E. coli. He was an EMBO Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry, Stanford University, where he worked with Dale Kaiser on development in the social bacterium Myxococcus xanthus. He was then a Max Planck Society Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Goettingen, Germany, where he began his studies in cell biology with Klaus Weber. In 1980 he was appointed to the faculty in the Cell Biology Department at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Texas. He moved to Cornell in 1981. He served on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Molecular Biology of the Cell, the Journal of Cell Biology and the Journal of Cell Science. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2009), the American Academy of Microbiology (2010), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018), and the American Society for Cell Biology (2019). He closed his research lab in 2023.