Gregory Petsko

Gregory A. Petsko (born 1948) is an American biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has an endowed professorship at Weill Cornell Medical College, is an adjunct professor at Cornell University, and is a professor emeritus at Brandeis University.

As of 2014 Petsko's research interests are understanding the biochemical bases of neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS, discovering drugs (especially by using structure-based drug design), that could therapeutically affect those biochemical targets, and seeing any resulting drug candidates tested in humans. He has made key contributions to the field of protein crystallography.

Education

Petsko was an undergraduate at Princeton University. He received a Rhodes Scholarship, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford supervised by David Chilton Phillips, studying Triosephosphate isomerase.

Career

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 he is Professor of Biochemistry and of Chemistry and Director of the Rosenstiel Center. He is Past-President of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. In April 2010, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.^[1] In 2012, he announced that he was moving to Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, where his wife, Laurie Glimcher, had been appointed Dean.^[2] He was appointed at Weill Cornell as the Director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer's Disease Research Institute and the Arthur J. Mahon Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute, at Cornell University as Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and retained an appointment at Brandeis as Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry, Emeritus.^[3][4]

Research

As of 2014 Petsko's research interests are understanding the biochemical bases of neurological diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS, discovering drugs (especially by using structure-based drug design) that could therapeutically affect those biochemical targets, and seeing any resulting drug candidates tested in humans.^[4][5]

Petsko's past research interests^[6] have been in protein crystallography. He is co-author with Dagmar Ringe of Protein Structure and Function.^[7] He is also the author of a monthly column in Genome Biology^[8][9] modelled after an amusing column in Current Biology penned by Sydney Brenner.^[10] 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.^[11][12][13]

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 Institute for Medical Research
• Ann Stock, professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Rutgers
• Steven Almo, professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
• Axel Brunger, professor at Stanford University
• Elias Lolis, professor at Yale University
• Dennis Vitkup, professor at Columbia University
• Charles Brenner, department head at University of Iowa
• Karen Allen, professor at Boston University
• Lynne Howell, professor at University of Toronto
• David Rose, professor at University of Waterloo
• and Stephen Burley of SGX Pharmaceuticals

References