Sean M. Decatur | |
---|---|
Born | |
Education | Hawken School |
Alma mater | Swarthmore College (B.A.) Stanford University (Ph.D.) |
Known for | president of American Museum of Natural History |
Spouse | Renee Romano |
Children | 2 |
Awards | Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Chemistry |
Institutions | Kenyon College |
Thesis | Novel strategies for probing structure-function relationships in myoglobin (1995) |
Sean M. Decatur (born September 4, 1968) is a chemist, college administrator and president, who was appointed president of the American Museum of Natural History in December 2022. [1] Decatur will be the first African-American to serve as the museum's president. Prior to this, he was president of Kenyon College from 2013 to 2022. [2]
Decatur is a native of the Cleveland, Ohio, area. His mother was a public school teacher of mathematics and science. He attended Cleveland public schools and the Hawken School. [3] He earned a bachelor's degree at Swarthmore College in 1990 and a doctorate in biophysical chemistry at Stanford University in 1995. [4]
Decatur taught at Mount Holyoke College from 1995 to 2008. He served as an assistant professor of chemistry, then an associate professor of chemistry, and served as department chair from 2001 to 2004. In 2005, he was appointed the Marilyn Dawson Sarles Professor of Life Sciences. He was also an associate dean of faculty for science from 2005 to 2008. [3]
Decatur was a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004 to 2005. From 2008 to 2013, he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin College. In 2013, he was named president of Kenyon College. [5]
During his final years at Kenyon College, Decatur faced challenges related both to labor organizing and transgender rights. [6] From 2020 to 2022, students expressed concern over the college not recognizing a student worker labor union. [7] [8] In 2022, students demanded that the college publicly support a transgender staff member, Rhea Debussy, who was receiving transphobic threats. When a statement was not issued, students delivered a list of demands to Decatur's office. [9] Following this, a transgender student then wrote an open letter to Decatur and the college community. [10]
Decatur is married to Renee Romano, professor of history and Comparative American studies at Oberlin College. [5] They have two children, Sabine and Owen.
Op-ed pieces on higher education
Scholarly articles–published
An alpha helix is a sequence of amino acids in a protein that are twisted into a coil.
Inorganic chemistry deals with synthesis and behavior of inorganic and organometallic compounds. This field covers chemical compounds that are not carbon-based, which are the subjects of organic chemistry. The distinction between the two disciplines is far from absolute, as there is much overlap in the subdiscipline of organometallic chemistry. It has applications in every aspect of the chemical industry, including catalysis, materials science, pigments, surfactants, coatings, medications, fuels, and agriculture.
Proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues. Proteins perform a vast array of functions within organisms, including catalysing metabolic reactions, DNA replication, responding to stimuli, providing structure to cells and organisms, and transporting molecules from one location to another. Proteins differ from one another primarily in their sequence of amino acids, which is dictated by the nucleotide sequence of their genes, and which usually results in protein folding into a specific 3D structure that determines its activity.
Spectroscopy is the field of study that measures and interprets electromagnetic spectra. In narrower contexts, spectroscopy is the precise study of color as generalized from visible light to all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Protein secondary structure is the local spatial conformation of the polypeptide backbone excluding the side chains. The two most common secondary structural elements are alpha helices and beta sheets, though beta turns and omega loops occur as well. Secondary structure elements typically spontaneously form as an intermediate before the protein folds into its three dimensional tertiary structure.
A hemeprotein, or heme protein, is a protein that contains a heme prosthetic group. They are a very large class of metalloproteins. The heme group confers functionality, which can include oxygen carrying, oxygen reduction, electron transfer, and other processes. Heme is bound to the protein either covalently or noncovalently or both.
A transmembrane protein is a type of integral membrane protein that spans the entirety of the cell membrane. Many transmembrane proteins function as gateways to permit the transport of specific substances across the membrane. They frequently undergo significant conformational changes to move a substance through the membrane. They are usually highly hydrophobic and aggregate and precipitate in water. They require detergents or nonpolar solvents for extraction, although some of them (beta-barrels) can be also extracted using denaturing agents.
Biochemistry is the study of the chemical processes in living organisms. It deals with the structure and function of cellular components such as proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids and other biomolecules.
Spectrophotometry is a branch of electromagnetic spectroscopy concerned with the quantitative measurement of the reflection or transmission properties of a material as a function of wavelength. Spectrophotometry uses photometers, known as spectrophotometers, that can measure the intensity of a light beam at different wavelengths. Although spectrophotometry is most commonly applied to ultraviolet, visible, and infrared radiation, modern spectrophotometers can interrogate wide swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum, including x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and/or microwave wavelengths.
George Claude Pimentel was a preeminent chemist and researcher. He was also dedicated to science education and public service. the inventor of the chemical laser. He developed the technique of matrix isolation in low-temperature chemistry. He also developed time-resolved infrared spectroscopy to study radicals and other transient species. In the late 1960s, Pimentel led the University of California team that designed the infrared spectrometer for the Mars Mariner 6 and 7 missions that analyzed the surface and atmosphere of Mars.
Protein structure is the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in an amino acid-chain molecule. Proteins are polymers – specifically polypeptides – formed from sequences of amino acids, which are the monomers of the polymer. A single amino acid monomer may also be called a residue, which indicates a repeating unit of a polymer. Proteins form by amino acids undergoing condensation reactions, in which the amino acids lose one water molecule per reaction in order to attach to one another with a peptide bond. By convention, a chain under 30 amino acids is often identified as a peptide, rather than a protein. To be able to perform their biological function, proteins fold into one or more specific spatial conformations driven by a number of non-covalent interactions, such as hydrogen bonding, ionic interactions, Van der Waals forces, and hydrophobic packing. To understand the functions of proteins at a molecular level, it is often necessary to determine their three-dimensional structure. This is the topic of the scientific field of structural biology, which employs techniques such as X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and dual polarisation interferometry, to determine the structure of proteins.
Resonance Raman spectroscopy is a variant of Raman spectroscopy in which the incident photon energy is close in energy to an electronic transition of a compound or material under examination. This similarity in energy (resonance) leads to greatly increased intensity of the Raman scattering of certain vibrational modes, compared to ordinary Raman spectroscopy.
The heteronuclear single quantum coherence or heteronuclear single quantum correlation experiment, normally abbreviated as HSQC, is used frequently in NMR spectroscopy of organic molecules and is of particular significance in the field of protein NMR. The experiment was first described by Geoffrey Bodenhausen and D. J. Ruben in 1980. The resulting spectrum is two-dimensional (2D) with one axis for proton (1H) and the other for a heteronucleus, which is usually 13C or 15N. The spectrum contains a peak for each unique proton attached to the heteronucleus being considered. The 2D HSQC can also be combined with other experiments in higher-dimensional NMR experiments, such as NOESY-HSQC or TOCSY-HSQC.
Vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) is a spectroscopic technique which detects differences in attenuation of left and right circularly polarized light passing through a sample. It is the extension of circular dichroism spectroscopy into the infrared and near infrared ranges.
Two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy is a nonlinear infrared spectroscopy technique that has the ability to correlate vibrational modes in condensed-phase systems. This technique provides information beyond linear infrared spectra, by spreading the vibrational information along multiple axes, yielding a frequency correlation spectrum. A frequency correlation spectrum can offer structural information such as vibrational mode coupling, anharmonicities, along with chemical dynamics such as energy transfer rates and molecular dynamics with femtosecond time resolution. 2DIR experiments have only become possible with the development of ultrafast lasers and the ability to generate femtosecond infrared pulses.
Molecular models of DNA structures are representations of the molecular geometry and topology of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules using one of several means, with the aim of simplifying and presenting the essential, physical and chemical, properties of DNA molecular structures either in vivo or in vitro. These representations include closely packed spheres made of plastic, metal wires for skeletal models, graphic computations and animations by computers, artistic rendering. Computer molecular models also allow animations and molecular dynamics simulations that are very important for understanding how DNA functions in vivo.
George R. Rossman is an American mineralogist and the Professor of Mineralogy at the California Institute of Technology.
Conantokins are a small family of helical peptides that are derived from the venom of predatory marine snails of the genus Conus. Conantokins act as potent and specific antagonists of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR). They are the only naturally-derived peptides to do so. The subtypes of conantokins exhibit a surprising variability of selectivity across the NMDAR subunits, and are therefore uniquely useful in developing subunit-specific pharmacological probes.
The beta bend ribbon, or beta-bend ribbon, is a structural feature in polypeptides and proteins. The shortest possible has six amino acid residues arranged as two overlapping hydrogen bonded beta turns in which the carbonyl group of residue i is hydrogen-bonded to the NH of residue i+3 while the carbonyl group of residue i+2 is hydrogen-bonded to the NH of residue i+5. In longer ribbons, this bonding is continued in peptides of 8, 10, etc., amino acid residues. A beta bend ribbon can be regarded as an aberrant 310 helix (3/10-helix) that has lost some of its hydrogen bonds. Two websites are available to facilitate finding and examining these features in proteins: Motivated Proteins; and PDBeMotif.
Jeanette Grasselli Brown is an American analytical chemist and spectroscopist who is known for her work with Standard Oil of Ohio as an industrial researcher in the field of spectroscopy.