Stephen C. Harrison is professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, professor of pediatrics, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics of Harvard Medical School, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital, and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.[1]
Education and career
He received his B.A. in chemistry and physics from Harvard in 1963, and was then a Henry fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge. In 1967, he received his Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard, was a research fellow there as well as a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows, and joined the Harvard faculty in 1971.
Research
His wide-ranging studies of protein structure have contributed insights to viral architecture, DNA–protein recognition, and cellular signaling.
Harrison has made important contributions to structural biology, most notably by determining and analyzing the structures of viruses and viral proteins, by crystallographic analysis of protein–DNA complexes,[2][3] and by structural studies of protein-kinase switching mechanisms.[4] The initiator of high-resolution virus crystallography, he has moved from his early work on tomato bushy stunt virus[5] (1978) to the study of more complex human pathogens, including the capsid of human papillomavirus,[6] the envelope of dengue virus,[7] and several components of HIV.[8] He has also turned some of his research attention to even more complex assemblies, such as clathrin-coated vesicles.[9] He led the Structural Biology team at the Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology (CHAVI) when it received National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funding [10] of around $300 million to address key immunological roadblocks to HIV vaccine development and to design, develop and test novel HIV vaccine candidates.
Harrison has been married to Tomas Kirchhausen, who is currently a Professor at Harvard Medical School,[18] since 2013.[19][20] They first met in 1978 at a small dinner hosted by Ada Yonath. In the fall of 1979, Tom moved to Cambridge, MA, to work with Harrison, and the two have been in a relationship ever since.[21]
^Ellenberger TE, Brandl CJ, Struhl K, Harrison SC (December 1992). "The GCN4 basic region leucine zipper binds DNA as a dimer of uninterrupted alpha helices: crystal structure of the protein-DNA complex". Cell. 71 (7): 1223–37. doi:10.1016/s0092-8674(05)80070-4. PMID1473154. S2CID13548424.
^Harrison SC (June 1969). "Structure of tomato bushy stunt virus. I. The spherically averaged electron density". J. Mol. Biol. 42 (3): 457–83. doi:10.1016/0022-2836(69)90236-8. PMID5804155.
