Keith D Wilkinson, PhD, Professor of Biochemistry at the School of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, and director of Emory's Graduate Division of Biological and Biomedical Sciences is a world renowned biochemist and enzymologist.  He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan, and, like Dr Haas, trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in the laboratory of 2004 Nobel Laureate Dr. Irwin Rose at Fox Chase Cancer Center, Philadelphia.
Dr. Wilkinson was invited as an honorary guest to the Nobel ceremonies held in Stockholm, Sweden on December 10, 2004. His Nobel essay, entitled "Ubiquitin: A Nobel Protein," appears in the December 17 issue of the journal Cell. It traces the history of the groundbreaking research on ubiquitin over the past 25 years.
Dr Wilkinson’s own contributiuons to the ubiquitin field are many and span several decades.  He discovered UCHL1, the first ubiquitin isopeptidase to be described, and showed that it was a target of therapeutic interest.  He was, thus, one of the first to recognize the importance of this class of enzyme to Therapeutic Focus.  Dr. Wilkinson’s laboratory has been a pioneer in the development of assays for isopeptidases that work on the ubiquitin family of proteins.