Nationality American Name Paul Modrich | ||
 | ||
Institutions Duke UniversityHoward Hughes Medical Institute Known for Clarification of cellular resistance to carcinogens Notable awards Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2015) | ||
Paul L. Modrich | Wikipedia audio article
Paul Lawrence Modrich (born June 13, 1946) is an American biochemist, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1973 from Stanford University and a B.S. degree in 1968 from MIT. He is known for his research on DNA mismatch repair. Modrich received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015, jointly with Aziz Sancar and Tomas Lindahl.
Contents
Personal life
Modrich was born on June 13, 1946, in Raton, New Mexico to Laurence and Margaret Modrich. He has a younger brother Dave. His father was a biology teacher and coach for basketball, football and tennis at Raton High School where he graduated in 1964. He is of Croatian descent; his paternal grandfather, and grandmother of Montenegrin descent, immigrated to the United States from Croatia. Modrich married fellow scientist Vickers Burdett in 1980.
Research
Modrich became an assistant professor at the chemistry department of University of California, Berkeley in 1974. He joined Duke University's faculty in 1976 and has been a Howard Hughes Investigator since 1995. He works primarily on strand-directed mismatch repair. His lab demonstrated how DNA mismatch repair serves as a copyeditor to prevent errors from DNA polymerase. Matthew Meselson previously proposed the existence of recognition of mismatches. Modrich performed biochemical experiments to study mismatch repair in E. coli. They later searched for proteins associated with mismatch repair in humans.
Dr. Modrich is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.
