FORA.tv Speaker - John Kuriyan

John Kuriyan is currently Chancellor's Professor at the University of California Berkeley in the departments of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) and Chemistry. He is also a Faculty Scientist in Berkeley Lab's Physical Biosciences Division, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Kuriyan received his B.S. in chemistry from Juniata College in Pennsylvania, followed by his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Gregory Petsko and Martin Karplus. He did postdoctoral work for one year under Karplus at Harvard before becoming an assistant professor at the Rockefeller University.

Kuriyan's laboratory studies the structure and mechanism of enzymes and other proteins that transduce cellular signals and perform DNA replication. The laboratory primarily uses x-ray crystallography to determine 3-D protein structures as well as biochemical, biophysical, and computational techniques to uncover the mechanisms used by these proteins.