Gregory Petsko

Gregory A. Petsko (born 1948) is an American biochemist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and 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 fields of protein crystallography, enzymology, and neuroscience.

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. he did a brief postdoctoral fellowship in Paris with Pierre Douzou, studying enzymology at low temperatures. In 1995 he did a sabbatical at the University of California at San Francisco with Ira Herskowitz, where he learned yeast genetics and molecular biology.

Career

Petsko's independent academic career included stints at Wayne State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Max Planck Institute, and, from 1991 until 2012, Brandeis University, where he was 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 and enzymology. He is co-author with Dagmar Ringe of Protein Structure and Function.^[7] He was 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 his collaborative work with Dagmar Ringe, in which they used 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 and Dagmar Ringe 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 and the Brookhaven Protein Data Bank

References