Background
Petsko, Gregory Anthony was born on August 7, 1948 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. Son of John and Mary (Santoro) Petsko.
chemistry and biochemistry scientist educator
Petsko, Gregory Anthony was born on August 7, 1948 in Washington, District of Columbia, United States. Son of John and Mary (Santoro) Petsko.
Petsko was an undergraduate at. He received a Rhodes Scholarship, and obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford supervised by David Chilton Phillips, studying Triosephosphate isomerase.
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 Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis , 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"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.
He was appointed at Weill Cornell as the Director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer"s Disease Institute and the Arthur J. Mahon Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience in the Feil Family Brain and Mind 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. As of 2014 Petsko"s research interests are understanding the biochemical bases of neurological diseases like Alzheimer"s, Parkinson"s, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis , 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.
Petsko"s past research interests have been in protein crystallography.
He 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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 Center Ilme Schlichting, department head at Max Planck Institute for Medical 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.
Member National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, American Academy Arts and Sciences, American Crystallographic Association (Siddhu award 1981), American Chemical Society (Pfizer award 1987), Biophysics Society, American Society Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, American Society Microbiology.
Married Carol Bannister Chamberlain, July 3, 1971 (divorced 1982).