Nikola Panayot Pavletich is the former chair of

structural biology Structural biology is a field that is many centuries old which, and as defined by the Journal of Structural Biology, deals with structural analysis of living material (formed, composed of, and/or maintained and refined by living cells) at every le ...

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK or MSKCC) is a cancer treatment and research institution in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital. MSKCC is one of 52 National Cancer Institute– ...

Education

Pavletich received his BS in chemistry from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

in 1988 and his PhD in molecular biology and genetics from

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (JHUSOM) is the medical school of Johns Hopkins University, a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1893, the School of Medicine shares a campus with the Johns Hopkins Hospi ...

in 1991. He did a postdoc at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

with Carl Pabo.

Career

He joined the faculty at Sloan Kettering in 1993 and was named chair of the Structural Biology Program in 2003. He has been an

HHMI The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fi ...

investigator since 1997. His laboratory researches malignant cell growth and DNA damage contributing to the development of cancer. DNA damage repair is a significant factor in whether a cell will become cancerous after genetic insult. Some of his major focuses have been the

mTOR The mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), also referred to as the mechanistic target of rapamycin, and sometimes called FK506-binding protein 12-rapamycin-associated protein 1 (FRAP1), is a kinase that in humans is encoded by the ''MTOR'' gene. ...

pathway and

BRCA1 Breast cancer type 1 susceptibility protein is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''BRCA1'' () gene. Orthologs are common in other vertebrate species, whereas invertebrate genomes may encode a more distantly related gene. ''BRCA1'' is a ...

. His lab uses

x-ray crystallography X-ray crystallography is the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract into many specific directions. By measuring the angles ...

to determine how proteins interact.

Awards

* 1994 – Pew Scholar * 1995 –

Beckman Young Investigators Award The Beckman Young Investigators Award was established by Mabel and Arnold Beckman in 1991, and is now administered by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation. The Beckman Young Investigator (BYI) Program is intended to provide research support to p ...

* 1999 – MIT Innovators under 35 * 2000 – AACR Award for Outstanding Achievement in Cancer Research * 2003 – Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research * 2012 – Elected member of the National Academy of Sciences * 2014 – Elected fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

* 2015 – Elected member of the Institute of Medicine * Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award, American Association for Cancer Research * DuPont-Merck Young Investigator Award, The Protein Society

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pavletich, Nikola P Cancer researchers Living people Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Members of the National Academy of Medicine Year of birth missing (living people)