Bioinorganic Chemistry

BIOGRAPHY

ACADEMIC POSITIONS:
• Professor of Chemistry, Boston University School of Medicine
• Professor of Pharmacology, Boston University School of Medicine
• Professor of Experimental Therapeutics, Boston University School of Medicine

EDUCATION AND POSITIONS:
• PhD Stanford University, 1979
• NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University, 1979-1982

MEMBERSHIPS:
Editorial Advisory Board of the Chemistry Central Journal

HONORS:
• Herbert A Sober Lecturer, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 1998
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1996
• Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, 1988-1993
• Fellow of the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, 1988-1992
• Research Career Development Award, National Institutes of Health, 1987-1992
• Searle Scholar, 1984-1987
• National Research Service Award, National Cancer Institute, 1979-1981

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
My laboratory develops and applies new methods for determining the structure of DNA and DNA-protein complexes. We have shown that the hydroxyl radical (•OH) is an almost ideal chemical probe for revealing the shape of a DNA molecule. My group also introduced the use of the hydroxyl radical as a high-resolution footprinting reagent for investigating the structure of DNA-protein complexes, and developed the missing nucleoside experiment as a rapid method for revealing the thermodynamically-important contacts made by a protein with its DNA binding site.

We now are using deuterium kinetic isotope effect experiments to reveal even finer details of how the hydroxyl radical cleavage pattern relates to the structure of a DNA or an RNA molecule.

We participated in the ENCODE Pilot Project sponsored by the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH. The aim of our work is to produce a map of the structure of the human genome, to better understand how the genome functions.