Doctoral advisor Donald Engelman Academic advisor Donald Engelman | Field Cancer | |
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Fields Growth factor receptor signaling
Cancer Biology Thesis Specific interactions between transmembrane alpha-helices: Their role in the oligomerization of integral membrane proteins (1993) Alma maters University of Oxford, Yale University Institutions University of Pennsylvania, Yale University | ||
Mark Andrew Lemmon FRS, an English-born biochemist, is the David A. Sackler Professor of Pharmacology at Yale University where he co-directs the Cancer Biology Institute with Joseph Schlessinger.
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Education
Lemmon was born in Norfolk, England in 1964. He was educated first at Norwich School, and then at Hertford College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry in 1988. He completed his PhD at Yale University as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellow supervised by Donald Engelman for research on the oligomerization of transmembrane α-helices. Following his PhD, Lemmon was a postdoctoral researcher and fellow of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation at New York University in the laboratory of Joseph Schlessinger.
Research and career
Following his postdoctoral studies, Lemmon was recruited to the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, where he gained tenure in 2001 and became Departmental Chair in 2008.
Lemmon's research combines biochemistry and structural biology with cell biology, focusing on understanding molecular mechanisms of transmembrane signalling by cell-surface growth factor receptors such as the epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor and other receptor tyrosine kinases. With Kathryn Ferguson and others, he also played an important role in understanding the structure and function of the Pleckstrin homology domain in phosphoinositide signaling and elsewhere.
Lemmon has made important contributions to the discovery of both normal and pathological activation mechanisms of growth factor receptors and the signalling networks that they engage within cells. He is also committed to exploiting this understanding clinically. These receptors and their downstream effectors are activated aberrantly in numerous cancers, and are important targets of cancer drugs. Lemmon’s recent work has focused on the need to understand the biochemistry of oncogenic activation to use such drugs effectively.
Before moving to Yale, Lemmon was George W. Raiziss Professor and Chair of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His research has been funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.
Lemmon serves on the editorial boards of several journals, including Cell and Molecular Cell. He is also Deputy Chair and Vice Chair for the Americas for the Biochemical Journal. Between 2007 and 2013, Lemmon was Secretary of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Awards and honours
Lemmon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016. In 2012, Lemmon won the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award of the Protein Society.