TED Community » Gregory Petsko

About Me

Dr. Petsko graduated Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University in 1970, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he completed his doctoral research in 1973 under the direction of Sir David C. Phillips. After a brief postdoctoral sojourn in Paris with Prof. Pierre Douzou, he was an Instructor and Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at Wayne State University School of Medicine from 1973 through 1978, where he twice received the Faculty Research Award. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he served as an Associate Professor of Chemistry from 1978 through 1985 and Professor of Chemistry from 1985 through 1989. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucille P. Markey Professor in Biochemisty and Chemisty at Brandeis University. From 1994 to 2006 he served as the Director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, at Brandeis Unviersity; and since 1996 has held the title of Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacodynamics, succeeding Prof. William P. Jencks, the first holder of this chair.

Although directing a Center with 16 faculty and 200 staff occupied a considerable chunk of his time, Prof. Petsko always carried a full teaching load, and is proud of having taught freshman chemistry continuously, with only time off for sabbaticals, for over 20 years. He also teaches critical thinking, protein crystallography, and the history of the detective story. His courses are consistently among the highest rated in the University.

He has received numerous awards, including the Sidhu Award of the American Crystallographic Association for outstanding contributions to X-ray diffraction, the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry of the American Chemical Society in 1986, an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award in 1989, and in 1991 he was awarded the Max Planck Prize, which he shared with Professor Roger Goody of Heidelberg for their work on the origins of some human cancers. In 1995 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2001 he received the Lynen Medal (shared with Professor Janet Thornton), and was elected to the Institute of Medicine. More recently, in 2002, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he shared an award from the McKnight Endowment for Neuroscience with his Brandeis colleague, Professor Dagmar Ringe. He and Prof. Ringe also shared the Abram Sachar Medallion in 2006.

Dr. Petsko is a co-founder of ArQule, Inc. of Woburn Massachusetts, one of the world’s leading companies in combinatorial chemistry, and serves on the boards of several other biotechnology companies, including Microbia and Compound Therapeutics. He is a member of both the Scientific Review Board and the Medical Advisory Board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes.

From 1988 through 2003 Dr. Petsko was Executive Editor for the journal Protein Engineering, which he co-founded. For the past six years he has written a monthly opinion column on science and society in the journal Genome Biology that is widely read and reprinted.

The research interests of Professor Petsko have always centered upon the structural basis of biochemical properties. His approach is to bring a chemical perspective to bear on problems in biochemistry, structural biology, cell biology, and human health. His primary research tools are: protein X-ray crystallography, molecular dynamics, site-directed mutagenesis and, more recently, yeast genetics. These tools are applied to diverse biochemical problems such as: the structural origins of enzyme catalytic power; the functional role of protein flexibility; the biochemistry and genetics of the quiescent state of the eukaryotic cell (using yeast as a model organism), and the causes and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, and schizophrenia.

Dr. Petsko describes himself as overweight, out of shape and frequently grouchy, opinions that are not upheld by peer review. Besides his family, teaching and his work, he says there are only a few things that he really loves: dogs; hiking through deserts, mountains and rain forests; good writing, single-malt Scotch, and high-performance cars (he usually drives, however, a Jeep – something about Brandeis salaries). Though excited about his new research directions in yeast cell biology and neurodegenerative diseases, Dr. Petsko states that his greatest accomplishment is, and always will be, the more than 100 graduate students and postdocs that he has helped to train.