Wah Chiu

Professor, Baylor College of Medicine
The Verna and Marrs McLean Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology

Professor Chiu, from Baylor College of Medicine, USA, will be arriving in Singapore on 6 July 2012 and will be with us for 3 weeks until 28 July 2012.

VISITING

06 July 2012 – 28 July 2012

CONTACT

Office: CBIS 02-09
Website: http://www.bcm.edu/biochem/?PMID=3715
Email: wah@bcm.edu

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Determining 3D structures of biological nanomachines using cryo-electron microscopy and computer reconstruction

AREAS OF STUDY

• Experimental and computational methods in biological cryo-electron microscopy
• Structural informatics
• Functional mechanisms of protein folding
• Functional mechanisms of viral infection

ABOUT PROF CHIU

Professor Chiu is the Founding Director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, Co-Director of the W.M. Keck Center for Computational Biology and also Director of the Center for Protein Folding Machinery. At the MCMI Professor Chiu directs efforts towards developing technology for near-atomic resolution structure determination.

He also serves as a member of the of the Scientific Advisory Board for Protein Data Bank and as a member of the Advisory Board for the NIH HIV Structural Biology Program as part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

ABOUT PROF CHIU’S LABORATORY

The Chiu Laboratory has pioneered various experimental and computational methods in biological cryo-EM. Using these techniques they have determined the cryo-EM structures of biological bundles, ion channels, viruses and chaperonins at unprecedented resolutions.

Recently achievements include the tracing of carbon backbones of protein components in several large molecular nanomachines, using single particle cryo-EM without the aid of crystallography. Many of the lab’s structural investigations have not only produced novel structural informatics but also insightful functional mechanisms on protein folding and viral infection.

Find out more about Professor Chiu.