Gregory Petsko

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Gregory A. Petsko is an American biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently the Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry & Chemistry at Brandeis University.

[edit] Education

Petsko was an undergraduate at Princeton University. He received a Rhodes Scholarship, and obtained his doctorate from Oxford University.

[edit] Academics

Petsko's independent academic career included stints at Wayne State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Max Planck Institute, and, since 1991, Brandeis University, where is Professor of Biochemistry and of Chemistry and Director of the Rosenstiel Center. He is President Elect of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

[edit] Research

Petsko is co-author with Dagmar Ringe of Protein Structure and Function. He is also the author of a monthly column in Genome Biology modelled after an amusing column in Current Biology penned by Sydney Brenner.

Petsko is best known for using X-ray crystallography to solve important problems in protein function including protein dynamics as a function of temperature and problems in mechanistic enzymology.

At MIT and Brandeis, he trained a large number of current leaders in structural molecular biology who now have leadership roles in science. These individuals include Tom Alber and John Kuriyan, professors at University of California, Berkeley; Barry Stoddard and Roland Strong, faculty at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Ilme Schlichting, department head at Max Planck, Heidelberg; Ann Stock, professor at HHMI and Rutgers; Alex Brunger, professor at Stanford; Charles Brenner, professor at Dartmouth Medical School; Karen Allen, professor at Boston University; Lynne Howell and David Rose, professors at University of Toronto; and Stephen Burley of SGX Pharmaceuticals.