Education
He was born in Los Angeles and attended public schools in Altadena and Pasadena, California.
He was born in Los Angeles and attended public schools in Altadena and Pasadena, California.
Clarke heads a laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles"s department of chemistry and biochemistry. Clarke is famous for his work on molecular damage and discoveries of novel molecular repair mechanisms. Steven Clarke has been on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry since 1978.
He is currently a Professor of Biochemistry and Director of the University of California, Los Angeles Molecular Biology Institute.
He did his undergraduate work at Pomona College, a private institution, in Claremont, majoring in Chemistry and Zoology. During this time, he did undergraduate research at the University of California, Los Angeles Brain Research Institute with James East. Skinner and Professor Donald Lindsley on neural mechanisms of attention.
He was also an National Institutes of Health fellow in the laboratory of Peter Mitchell at Glynn Research Laboratories in Bodmin, England studying mitochondrial amino acid transport. He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University working as an National Science Foundation Fellow with Professor Guido Guidotti on membrane protein-detergent interactions and the identification of the major rat liver mitochondrial polypeptides as enzymes of the urea cycle.
He returned to California to do postdoctoral work as a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, with Professor Daniel Koshland, identifying membrane receptors for bacterial chemotaxis.
Clarke"s research at University of California, Los Angeles has focused on roles of novel protein methyltransferases in aging and biological regulation highlighted by discoveries of the protein repair L-isoaspartyl methyltransferase, the isoprenylcysteine protein methyltransferase, and the protein phosphatase 2A methyltransferase. He has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University (1986-1987) and at the University of Washington (2004-2005).
