View Scientific Pedigree
Thomas P. Sakmar is Professor and Head of the Laboratory of
Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at The Rockefeller
University.
He was raised on the east side of Detroit,
Michigan where he attended neighborhood public and parochial
schools. He received his A.B. degree in chemistry from the
University of Chicago and his M.D. degree from the University
of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. During school breaks
he worked initially as a telephone cable splicer and an arc
welder until landing research positions at University of
Chicago and the Food and Drug Administration in Bethesda,
Maryland. While attending a special biophysics school in
France in 1979 he was inspired by Martin Rodbell, who had
just coined the term "signal transduction," and went on to
win the Nobel Prize in 1984. Dr. Sakmar went on to complete
a medical residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital,
Boston, and conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory
of H. Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
During his post-doctoral research training, Dr. Sakmar was among
the first scientists to study the function of a newly discovered
class of cell surface receptors using techniques of molecular
biology. Using rhodopsin, the receptor for dim-light in the
retina, as a model system, Dr. Sakmar has continued to study
the dynamics of receptor activation - the conformational changes
that rapidly occur when rhodopsin absorbs a photon of light or
a receptor binds to a hormone. Dr. Sakmar has also made major
contributions to understanding the chemical basis for color vision.
Dr. Sakmar is also an Associate Investigator of the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute in their Neuroscience Program and a Senior
Scholar of the Ellison Medical Foundation.
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