Thomas P. Sakmar (born 1956) is an American physician-scientist and the former acting president of The Rockefeller University.[2] Prior to becoming acting president he was associate dean for graduate studies in the Tri-Institutional MD–PhD Program.

Thomas P. Sakmar
Sakmar in 2015
Acting President of The Rockefeller University
In office
February 11, 2002 (2002-02-11) – September 1, 2003 (2003-09-01)
Preceded byArnold J. Levine
Succeeded bySir Paul Nurse
Personal details
Born1956 (age 67–68)
Detroit, Michigan
Children3
ResidenceNew York
Alma materUniversity of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forSpectral tuning, G protein-coupled receptors
AwardsHonorary Doctorate from Karolinska Institute (2020)[1]
Scientific career
FieldsChemical biology
Institutions
Doctoral advisorH. Gobind Khorana
Other academic advisorsBruce Merrifield

Sakmar earned his A.B. in chemistry from University of Chicago and in 1982 received his M.D. from University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He carried out clinical training in internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and postdoctoral training with H. Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before starting the laboratory of molecular biology and biochemistry at The Rockefeller University in 1990.

With 200 peer-reviewed research articles[3] he is best known for his work on spectral tuning[4] in photopigments and for developing drug discovery methods[5] _targeting G protein-coupled receptors. He has been a senior fellow[6] of the Ellison Medical Foundation, an investigator [7] of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Marie Krogh Visiting Professor at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen as well as guest professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

In 2020 he was awarded an honorary doctorate (honoris causa) from Karolinska Institute.[8]

References

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  1. ^ "Thomas P. Sakmar receives 2020 honorary doctorate from Karolinska Institute". Karolinska Institutet. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
  2. ^ Arenson, Karen W. (12 February 2002). "Thomas P. Sakmar assumes office as the university's acting president". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 September 2016.
  3. ^ "Bibliography for Thomas P. Sakmar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  4. ^ Kochendoerfer, Gerd G.; Lin, Steven W.; Sakmar, Thomas P.; Mathies, Richard A. (August 1999). "How color visual pigments are tuned". Trends in Biochemical Sciences. 24 (8): 300–305. doi:10.1016/S0968-0004(99)01432-2. PMID 10431173.
  5. ^ Ellis, Clare (July 2004). "The state of GPCR research in 2004". Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. 3 (7): 577–626. doi:10.1038/nrd1458. PMID 15272499. S2CID 33620092.
  6. ^ "Ellison Medical Foundation, Senior Scholar Award in Aging of the Visual System".
  7. ^ "HHMI Alumni: Thomas P. Sakmar, MD". HHMI.org.
  8. ^ "Honorary Doctors at Karolinska Institute". Karolinska Institutet. Retrieved 15 April 2020.
Academic offices
Preceded by Acting President of Rockefeller University
Feb. 2002-Sept. 2003
Succeeded by
  NODES
INTERN 1
Note 1