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Ann McDermott

Board Member

Ronald and Esther Breslow Professor of Biological Chemistry, Columbia University in the City of New York

Ann has a B. Sc. in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College and a Ph. D. in Chemistry from U. C. Berkeley. She carried out postgraduate work at MIT with Dr. Robert Griffin studying Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and at the Tropical Medicine Institute of the ULB in Brussels, Belgium, studying drug design and development. She has been on the faculty of Columbia University since 1991. Her research group, with approximately 10 members, has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, the Sloan Research Foundation and the Cottrell Research Foundation. She has been the chair and organizer of a Gordon Research Conference on Computational Aspects of Biomolecular NMR (January 2004) and other meetings. She is the author or coauthor of over 150 peer reviewed publications, and served as Chair of Chemistry, Associate Vice President for Academic Advising and Science Initiatives in the Arts and Sciences, and co-PI of an innovative tutoring program, the Teaching and Learning Center of Columbia University.

Ann McDermott’s research program aims to understand the remarkable ability of proteins to catalyze chemical reactions and participate in signaling cascades. She has developed and applied magnetic resonance methods to probe the structure, flexibility and function of proteins. Her group investigates allosteric regulation and timing of potassium ion channels, which play crucial roles in diverse contexts, from bacteria to the human nervous system. Her research group has determined the structures and characterized the dynamics of amyloids whose formation is a critical step in cellular signaling in humans. She discovered and characterized a novel polarization (NMR signal enhancement) mechanism associated with the photochemical reactions in the photosynthetic reaction center. On the basis of this research, she is the recipient of the Pure Award in Chemistry (1996) and the Eastern Analytic Symposium Award for Achievement in Magnetic Resonance (2005), and she is an elected member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.