Scientific Advisory Board
William F. DeGrado, PhD – Chairman of the ExSAR Scientific Advisory Board
Dr. DeGrado is currently Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Investigator, Cardiovascular Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. His focus at UCSF is molecular design as an approach to understanding macromolecule structure and function. Previously, Dr. DeGrado was the George W. Raiziss Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his BS in Chemistry from Kalamazoo College and his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1977. His published research includes contributions to the fields of protein design, synthesis of peptidomimetics, and characterization of membrane-active peptides and proteins, most notably the M2 protein.
James Broach, PhD
Dr. Broach is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Yale University in 1969 and his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, where he also completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medical Physics. Dr. Broach served on the Scientific Review Board of the Frederick Cancer Center of the National Cancer Institute and has served as a member of both the Genetics and the Genomics Study Sections and Chair of the Genomics, Computational Biology and Technology Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. He was co-founder and Director of Research for Cadus Pharmaceuticals and sits on the Board of Directors of Cadus Corporation. Dr. Broach served as Associate Director of the Lewis Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and is the co-director of the Center for Computational Biology at Princeton University. Dr. Broach is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the Co-Director of the Life Sciences Research Foundation, a private organization that provides postdoctoral fellowships in the life sciences. Dr. Broach is a Trustee of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, a Commissioner on the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research and a member of the Science Board of the Food and Drug Administration. He is currently President of the Cancer Biology Training Consortium, a national organization promoting graduate and postdoctoral training in cancer biology. Dr. Broach has published more than 150 articles in the area of molecular biology and holds a number of patents in drug discovery technologies.
S. Walter Englander, PhD
Dr. Englander is the Jacob Gershon-Cohen Professor of Medical Science and Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Fellow of the Biophysical Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, Dr. Englander received the Biophysical Society Founders Award for pioneering the development of hydrogen exchange techniques for exploring the stability, interactions and dynamics of macromolecules and their folding. His work has focused on the physical processes underlying amide hydrogen exchange and models that correlate internal protein motions to the observed amide hydrogen exchange rates.
Patrick R. Griffin, PhD
Dr. Griffin is Professor and Chair of Molecular Therapeutics, and as Director of the Translational Research Institute, plays a critical role in Scripps Florida’s discovery pipeline. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, Dr. Griffin was involved in ground-breaking work in biological mass spectrometry. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Caltech with Lee Hood and an appointment at Genentech, he joined Merck Research Laboratories as a biochemist working on inflammation, infectious diseases, and metabolic disorders. Later, as Merck’s Senior Director of Chemistry, he led a team of over 40 scientists focused on drug discovery, resulting in the development of an investigational drug for treatment of pulmonary disease, and sitagliptin (MK-0431), an FDA-approved oral medication for the management of Type 2 diabetes. In 2002, Dr. Griffin left Merck to become Chief Scientific Officer at ExSAR Corporation. In 2004 he became Professor of Biochemistry at The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Florida. In June 2006, he was named Director of the Translational Research Institute, and, in March 2007, Dr. Griffin was named Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Therapeutics. Dr. Griffin’s lab is focused on chemical biology and structure-function of nuclear receptors and G protein coupled receptors
Edwin H. Kolodny, MD
Dr. Kolodny is currently Research Professor of Neurology at the New York University School of Medicine. Previously, he held the distinction of being the Bernard A. and Charlotte Marden Professor of Neurology and Chairman at the New York University School of Medicine. He has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases Association since 1970. Dr. Kolodny received his AB from Harvard College (cum laude in Economics) and received his MD from the New York University School of Medicine in 1962. His medical interests include neurology, neurogenetics, developmental disabilities, inborn errors of metabolism and neurodegenerative diseases. His research interests include: clinical, biochemical and genetic characterization of degenerative diseases of the nervous system; biochemical genetics, diagnosis, prevention and epidemiology of the lysosomal storage diseases; and, linkage analysis and gene isolation for lysosomal storage diseases and other degenerative diseases of the nervous system.
Don Mahuran, PhD
Dr. Mahuran is presently a senior scientist at the Research Institute of the Hospital for Sick Children (HSC) and a professor in the department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathobiology at the University of Toronto, Canada. His basic research since 1978 has focused on lysosomal storage diseases in general and GM2 Gangliosidosis (the AB-variant, Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff disease) in particular. His body of work when combined with other work on these diseases, carried out worldwide over the last forty years, has made possible the development of novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment of several lysosomal storage diseases. He currently coordinates a group of eight Canadian researchers funded by a “Team” grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Sciences, whose goals are to develop and expand these therapeutic approaches for lysosomal storage diseases.