Gregory Petsko | |
---|---|
Born | 1948 (age 68–69) |
Institutions |
Weill Cornell Medical College Cornell University Brandeis University Wayne State University MIT Max Planck Institute University of Oxford Princeton University |
Alma mater | Princeton University |
Thesis | Structural studies of triose phosphate isomerase. (1974) |
Doctoral advisor | David Chilton Phillips |
Notable awards |
Rhodes Scholarship Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences |
Website brainandmind |
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.