Name Daved Fremont | ||
Daved H. Fremont (born January 13, 1964) is an Associate Professor at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine with dual appointments in the Departments of Pathology and Immunology/Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. He is currently director of the Computational and Molecular Biophysics Program. Fremont is also a principal investigator in the Center for Structural Genomics of Infectious Disease (CSGID) and his laboratory has deposited structures of proteins from several major human pathogens to the protein data bank (PDB).
In 1993, Fremont received his PhD in chemistry working in Ian Wilson’s laboratory at the The Scripps Research Institute while a student at the University of California, San Diego. Here, he determined the first x-ray crystal structures of a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) bound to specific peptides. These structures of the H-2Kb molecule, published in Science in 1992, played a pivotal role in defining the molecular details of host discrimination of “self” versus “non-self”, and had been cited 847 times according to Google Scholar. His work helped explain how a single MHC class I molecule is able to bind a vast array of different antigen peptide sequences and established that MHC class I molecules bind primarily to the backbone atoms of antigen peptides in a sequence-independent manner. Fremont continued his work in structural immunology as a post-doctoral fellow with Wayne Hendrickson at Columbia University and John Kappler at the National Jewish Center. There he solved a number of MHC structures, most notably that of murine H2-M, a chaperone involved in MHC class I loading.
In 1998, he joined Washington University in St. Louis as an Assistant Professor where his research expanded to include viral immune evasion and antibody-mediated neutralization. His laboratory has since established the structural basis for interactions between host cytokines and pox- and herpesviruses decoy receptors and neutralization of West Nile Virus by therapeutic antibodies. Fremont is now best known for his research on how the immune system recognizes viruses and the subversion mechanisms they deploy to avoid detection and clearance.
On the personal side, Fremont is married and has a daughter. He enjoys playing Go and Poker; in the latter, he is partial to seven card stud, especially the Chesterfield version, and does not prefer wild card games.