Thomas P. Sakmar, M.D.

Thomas P. Sakmar, M.D., is the Richard M. and Isabel P. Furlaud Professor at The Rockefeller University, where he heads the Laboratory of Chemical Biology and Signal Transduction. Dr. Sakmar uses interdisciplinary approaches to study how chemical signals are relayed from the outside to the inside of a cell – a process called signal transduction, which allows cells and organisms to sense their environments.

Dr. Sakmar received an A.B. in chemistry from the University of Chicago and his M.D. from Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. He carried out clinical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and conducted postdoctoral research with Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying DNA chemistry and gene synthesis. He has been an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a senior scholar of the Ellison Medical Foundation and has been a guest professor at the University of Copenhagen and at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2020. Dr. Sakmar served as acting president of The Rockefeller University in 2002–2003.