Fred Sigworth is a native of California's Bay Area. He studied applied physics at Caltech and was a graduate student at the University of Washington and at Yale University, working in the laboratory of Charles F. Stevens. He received the PhD in physiology from Yale in 1979. He was a postdoc in the laboratory of Erwin Neher in Göttingen. He has been a faculty member at Yale since 1984. " How do I see the scientific enterprise? An old book puts it this way: one generation commends God's works to another. It is a great privilege to unravel the workings of ion channels, and to pass on the excitement about these molecular machines to students, colleagues and anyone else who will listen!" Fred has three sons, all of whom are in college. His wife Vicky works with Youth for Christ in the New Haven area.