Brian Kobilka will visit the Department of Chemistry to give his Frontiers in Chemistry Lecture as a Shaomeng Wang and Ju-Yun Li Distinguished Lecturer. The event will take place Thursday, Feb. 29, at 11:30 a.m. in Schmitt Auditorium. He will be presenting his lecture titled “Challenges and New Approaches to Drug Discovery for G Protein Coupled Receptors.”
Kobilka is an American physiologist and a recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Robert Lefkowitz for discoveries that reveal the workings of G protein-coupled receptors. He is currently a professor in the department of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He is also a co-founder of ConfometRx, a biotech company focusing on G protein-coupled receptors. He was named a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
Dr. Kobilka received Bachelor of Science Degrees in biology and chemistry from the University of Minnesota, Duluth in 1977. He graduated from Yale University School of Medicine in 1981, and completed residency training in Internal Medicine at the Barnes Hospital, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri in 1984. From 1984-1989 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Robert Lefkowitz at Duke University. In 1990 he joined the faculty of Medicine and Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University. He was promoted to Professor of Medicine and Molecular and Cellular Physiology in 2000. Research in the Kobilka lab focuses on the structure and mechanism of action of G protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), which constitute the largest family of receptors for hormones and neurotransmitters in the human genome. GPCRs are the largest group of targets for new therapeutics for a very broad spectrum of diseases.