Biochemistry has a new Editor-in-Chief in Yale University Professor Alanna Schepartz. If Schepartz’s name sounds familiar to readers of ACS journals, it may be because she’s served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2005. In 2010, Schepartz was named a fellow of the ACS and in 2008 she […]

Alanna Schepartz

Of course, Alanna Schepartz has an impressive CV outside of her work with ACS. Since 2000, she has been the Milton Harris ’29 Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University. In 2008, she won the Frank H. Westheimer Prize Medal and in 2010 she was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She’s also the winner of the 2010 Alexander M. Cruickshank Prize, the 2012 Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry and the 2015 Wheland Prize Medal.

Alanna Schepartz is known for her work in the creative application of chemical principles to understand and control biological recognition and function. Her research seeks to understand the fundamental chemistry that underlies protein and small molecule interactions in cells and to apply this knowledge to exploit and manipulate cell function and drive the development of next-generation therapeutics. She is interested in how the endocytic pathway can be repurposed to traffic peptides, proteins, and their mimetics to desired cellular locale, the design and evolution of non-natural polymers that fold into stable, defined, three-dimensional shapes, how ribosomes can be repurposed for the synthesis of non-alpha amino acid polymers, and most recently, how proteins control the flow of molecules and molecular information through cellular membranes. This final topic has provided fundamentally new insights into biased signaling and activation of receptor tyrosine kinases related to EGFR, a breakthrough that may have important implications in the field of cancer drug discovery.

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