IBNAM Colloquium: David Tirrell
The Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine (IBNAM) is pleased to host a fall colloquium featuring David Tirrell, Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
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"Reinterpreting the Genetic Code: Non-Canonical Amino Acids in Protein Design, Evolution and Analysis" |
The genetic code, elucidated in the 1960s through the work of Nirenberg, Ochoa, and Khorana, provides a set of molecular instructions for turning DNA into proteins. But what if we could change the meaning of those instructions and decide for ourselves how to interpret the genetic code? What kinds of protein chemistry could we do then? Over the last decade, cells have been outfitted with modified molecular machinery that enables them to use non-standard sets of amino acids to make proteins. These developments have enabled powerful new approaches to protein design, protein evolution, biological imaging, and proteome-wide analysis of cellular processes.
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| David A. Tirrell is the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. After earning the B.S. in Chemistry at MIT in 1974, Tirrell enrolled in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for work done under the supervision of Otto Vogl. After a brief stay with Takeo Saegusa at Kyoto University, Tirrell accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University in the fall of 1978. Tirrell returned to Amherst in 1984 and served as Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts before moving to Caltech in 1998. He served as chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech from 1999 until 2009. |
Tirrell’s contributions to macromolecular chemistry have been recognized by his election to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the Arthur C. Cope Scholar, Carl Marvel, Harrison Howe, S. C. Lind and Madison Marshall Awards of the American Chemical Society, as well as the ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry. He holds the Chancellor’s Medal of the University of Massachusetts, the G. N. Lewis Medal of the University of California Berkeley, and the degree of Doctor honoris causa from the Technical University of Eindhoven.
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