Education
Green attended high school in Ashland, Master of Arts. He graduated magna cum laude from the Yale University with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Distinction in Biology in 1977. After training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 1977 and 1978, he graduated in 1981 with a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University, where he studied immunology with Richard K. Gershon.
He joined the faculty at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1989, and in 1990 became Member and Head of the Division of Cellular Immunology at the Louisiana Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in San Diego, where he worked until 2005. He was adjunct of the University of California, San Diego from 1994 to 2005.
He became chair of Immunology of Saint Jude Children"s Hospital, Memphis in 2005.
Career
He holds the Peter C. Doherty Endowed Chair of Immunology in Saint Jude Children"s Hospital. His research has focused on the process of active cell death and cell survival, extending from the role of cell death in cancer regulation and immune responses in the whole organism to the fundamental molecular events directing the death of the cell. Green is editor in chief of the Nature Publishing Group journal Oncogene (journal).
He is the author of the book Cell Death, Means To An End.
After many studies on immunological tolerance, Green"s work on cell death began with his discovery of activation-induced apoptosis in T lymphocytes, the role of c-Myc in this process and the finding that Bcl-2 cooperates with Myc in oncogenesis by blocking apoptosis. More recently, he discovered the process of LC3-associated phagocytosis, which links the autophagy pathway to phagosome maturation.
Other areas of interest include regulated necrosis, metabolic reprogramming in T lymphocytes, and the function of the tumor suppressor, p53. As of 2014 he had published many chapters and books and over 500 papers, making him one of the world"s most cited molecular biologists.
He is listed in: Inter-Services Intelligence "highly cited" (Immunology 2003) Inter-Services Intelligence "highly cited" (Molecular Biology/Genetics 2014) He is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin (2010).