Current Position: Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Programs of Chemical Biology and Neuroscience at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA

Education: Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry (1998) from MIT where he synthesized psoralen and aflatoxin B containing oligonucelotides

Non-scientific Interests: Golf, skiing, oenology, and whatever his 4-year-old daughter is interested in (currently the PBS show, “Peep and the Big Wide World,” and sidewalk chalk)

I was first motivated to use chemical synthesis as a tool to answer biological questions by Professor Carolyn Bertozzi when she was a graduate student and I was undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. During my thesis work on damaged DNA molecules, I realized that I did not like performing DNA repair assays, and I needed to find an area of biology that stimulated my hands as well as my brain. It was during this "mid-thesis" crisis that I stumbled upon the ion channel field because these biophysicists were already dipping into the organic chemists' toolbox to interrogate the structure and function of ion channels. For my postdoctoral work, I was fortunate to find a "krazy" biophysicist (Chris Miller, Brandeis University) willing to teach an organic chemist the idiosyncrasies of measuring currents from K⁺ channels. It was during my postdoctoral training that I discovered that the tetramerization (T1) domain of Shaker-like K⁺ channels hangs from the membrane-embedded parts of the protein like a basket from a hot air balloon. It was this structure that made me appreciate that K⁺ channels are multi-subunit macromolecular complexes, and this is why my laboratory studies K⁺ channel complex assembly, trafficking, structure and function.

Read Dr. Kobertz's article on page 25105.

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