Member News

Kuriyan to take over as dean; Johnson wins Pew scholarship

ASBMB Today Staff
Sept. 19, 2022

Kuriyan to take over as dean at Vanderbilt med school

John Kuriyan, a distinguished professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, has been named the next dean of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences.

Portrait of John Kuriyan
John Kuriyan

Kuriyan succeeds Lawrence Marnett, also an ASBMB member, who was named founding dean of the basic sciences school in 2016 after the university separated from Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

After Kuriyan takes over on Jan. 1, Marnett plans to take a sabbatical and then return to the faculty. "I am excited for John's leadership," Marnett said in a press release. "He will be a beacon for attracting the very best biomedical scientists to campus."

Kuriyan's research focuses on conformational changes and post-translational modifications that switch on activity in signaling molecules involved in signal transduction. His lab has studied autophosphorylation, subunit exchange, redox changes and dimerization in proteins including tyrosine kinases, such as Src and Btk, the calcium-activated kinase CaMKII, and various proteins involved in signaling downstream of receptor tyrosine kinases including the Ras activator SOS. They previously studied the structures of proteins involved in DNA replication, including polymerase sliding clamp complexes. The lab has a whimsical tradition of illustrating their articles with art in the style of international postage stamps.

Kuriyan grew up in India and studied chemistry for two years at the University of Madras before transferring to Juniata College for his bachelor's degree. He earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and continued to work with graduate advisors Martin Karplus and Gregory Petsko during a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University before starting as a professor at Rockefeller University.

Kuriyan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society. Among many honors, he received the ASBMB-Merck award in 2009. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Protein Science.

Johnson wins Pew scholarship

Elizabeth Johnson, an assistant professor at Cornell University, has been named to the newest class of Pew Biomedical Scholars. The 22 scholars were chosen from almost 200 applicants.

Portrait of Elizabeth Johnson
Elizabeth Johnson

Johnson studies how the fats in human milk interact with the infant microbiome to support the generation of beneficial metabolites. Her lab also is interested more broadly in interactions between the diet, the microbiome and the host. They developed a method called BOSSS that uses click chemistry to fluorescently label metabolites derived from a certain dietary source, and then isolates fluorescent microbes to identify specific strains that interact with specific dietary lipids. Using this approach, Johnson's lab recently identified the bacterial enzyme that converts cholesterol to cholesterol-3-sulfate, which can bind to DNA methyltransferases and influence inflammatory status.

Johnson was an undergraduate at Spelman College and earned her Ph.D. at Princeton University, studying RNA dynamics to understand how cells survive quiescence, or cell cycle arrest. She was a postdoc at Cornell and in Ruth Ley’s lab at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, where she studied sphingolipid production by gut microbes.

The Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences provides funding relevant to advancing human health to investigators in their first few years at the assistant professor level by making grants to academic institutions to support the scholars' independent research.

Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?

Become a member to receive the print edition monthly and the digital edition weekly.

Learn more
ASBMB Today Staff

This article was written by a member or members of the ASBMB Today staff.

Get the latest from ASBMB Today

Enter your email address, and we’ll send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.

Latest in People

People highlights or most popular articles

The perfect storm
Feature

The perfect storm

Dec. 6, 2023

The world has 2023 Nobel laureates Katalin Karikó, Drew Weissman and others to thank for laying a foundation for the COVID-19 vaccine decades before the pandemic.

Throw your hat in the ring!
Annual Meeting

Throw your hat in the ring!

Dec. 6, 2023

Apply to speak at Discover BMB in Chicago in 2025.

In memoriam: Charles Kasper
In Memoriam

In memoriam: Charles Kasper

Dec. 4, 2023

He was a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research and an ASBMB member since 1970.

Building a chapter through community
Student Chapters

Building a chapter through community

Dec. 4, 2023

Olivia Miller sought to balance fun, education and outreach in student chapter activities at Otterbein University.

NIH diversity supplements offer a pathway to independence
Funding

NIH diversity supplements offer a pathway to independence

Nov. 29, 2023

These funding mechanisms have been underutilized. The ASBMB public affairs staff offers recommendations to change that.

A chapter builds connections
Student Chapters

A chapter builds connections

Nov. 27, 2023

The ASBMB helped Lauryn Ridley build a community among her peers: “It’s outside the classroom, and you can be free to relate to other people who are going through the same things that you’re going through.”