Dr. J. Andrew McCammon
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, NSF Center for Theoretical Biological
Physics, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, and Department of
Pharmacology, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0365
That cells are able to survive and function is partly due to specific, noncovalent binding of pairs of molecules - biomolecular recognition - within the heavy molecular traffic in and around cells. Timely binding of the correct molecular partners is critical in signal transduction, the expression of genetic information, the assembly of cellular components, and all other cellular activities. Molecular recognition is also central to many disease processes and medical therapies. Continuing advances in computational and structural biology will provide a deeper understanding of how biological activity at the cellular and higher levels emerges from the molecular level. Some early efforts toward this synthesis will be described, with special reference to neuronal activity.
Images and animations related to this work can be found at the McCammon lab website.
J. Andrew McCammon is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He holds the Joseph E. Mayer Chair of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and is Professor of Pharmacology at the UCSD School of Medicine. He was born in Lafayette, Indiana in 1947. He received his B.A. from Pomona College, and his Ph.D. in chemical physics from Harvard University, where he worked with John Deutch on biological applications of statistical mechanics and hydrodynamics. In 1976-78, he was a research fellow at Harvard, where he developed the computer simulation approach to protein dynamics in collaboration with Martin Karplus. He joined the faculty of the University of Houston as Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1978, and was appointed to the M.D. Anderson Chair at Houston in 1981. He moved to his current positions at UCSD in 1995.
Professor McCammon has developed novel theoretical methods for accurately predicting and interpreting molecular recognition, the rates of diffusion-controlled reactions, and other properties of chemical systems. In addition to their fundamental interest, these methods play a growing role in the design of new drugs, enzymes, receptors, and other materials. Professor McCammon is the author with Stephen Harvey of “Dynamics of Proteins and Nucleic Acids” (Cambridge University Press), and is the author or co-author of more than 400 papers on a variety of subjects in theoretical chemistry and theoretical biochemistry. His former students now have tenured or tenure-track faculty positions at many leading institutions. Within the US, the latter include the Universities of California (4), Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Texas, New York University, Washington University (2), and Vanderbilt. Elsewhere, these include the EMBL/EML in Heidelberg, the ETH in Zurich, the IIT in Bombay, the International University Bremen, National Taiwan University, Philipps-University Marburg, Saarland University, and the University of Toronto.
Professor McCammon has served on advisory boards for the National Academy of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies. He received the first George Herbert Hitchings Award for Innovative Methods in Drug Design from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 1987. In 1991, he was a Centennial Lecturer at the University of Chicago. In 1995, he received the Computerworld Smithsonian Information Technology Leadership Award for Breakthrough Computational Science, sponsored by Cray Research. In 2002, he received the Chancellor’s Associates Award for Research. His other awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health, and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the Biophysical Society.