Faculty

M.Reza Ghadiri 
Professor
Department of Chemistry
TSRI - 1988

Joint Appointments 
The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology

Education 
B.A. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1982
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987
Postdoctoral Fellow Rockefeller University, 1987-1989

Awards & Activities 
Searle Scholars Award 1991-1994
Arnold & Mable Beckman Young Investigator Award 1991-1993
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow 1993-1995
Eli Lilly Grantee 1994-1995
American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry 1995
Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, American Chemical Society 1999
Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology 1998
Visiting Professor, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago, Spain 2001
Merck-Frosst Lecturer, University of Victoria, British Columbia 2001
Belleau Lecturer, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec 2001.

Research Focus 
Organic, Bioorganic, and Materials Chemistry

Our group is involved in a multidisciplinary research effort that uses disciplines ranging from synthetic organic and inorganic chemistry to materials science and recombinant DNA technology to develop novel methods for the rational design and construction of functional biomaterial-based structures. Our goal is to provide novel applications in the field of molecular and system engineering as well as advance our fundamental understanding of living chemical processes. Currently, research projects in our laboratory deal with various aspects of peptide and protein architecture and folding, design of synthetic receptors and enzymes, fabrication of novel biosensor arrays, self-replicating molecular systems, and self-organized nonlinear autocatalytic chemical networks and ecosystems. selected references

Selected References 
Lin, V. S.-Y.; Motesharei, K.; Dancil, K.; Sailor, M, J.; Ghadiri, M. R. "A Porous Silicon-Based Optical Interferometric Biosensor, " Science 278: 840-843, 1997.

Severin, K.; Lee, D. H.; Kennan, A. J.; Ghadiri, M. R. "A Synthetic Peptide Ligase," Nature 389: 706-709, 1997.

Lee, D. H.; Severin, K.; Yokobayashi, Y.; Ghadiri, M. R. "Emergence of Symbiosis in Peptide Self-Replication Through a Hypercyclic Network," Nature 390: 591, 1997.

Severin, K.; Lee, D. H.; Martinez, J. A.; Vieth, M.; Ghadiri, M. R. "Dynamic Error-Correction in Autocatalytic Peptide Networks," Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 37: 126-128, 1998.