21 Facts About Peter Dervan

1.

Peter B Dervan was born on June 28,1945 and is the Bren Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

2.

Peter Dervan is the recipient of many awards, including the National Medal of Science.

3.

Peter B Dervan was born on June 28,1945 in Boston, Massachusetts in an Irish immigrant family.

4.

Peter Dervan grew up in a poor family of six in Dorchester, a working-class suburb of Boston.

5.

Peter Dervan began graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin then moved with Jerome A Berson's research group to Yale University where he completed his graduate research in physical organic chemistry, studying ways in which chemical bonds are created and broken apart.

6.

Peter Dervan then became an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, working with Eugene van Tamelen.

7.

Peter Dervan became an associate professor in 1979, and professor in 1982.

8.

Peter Dervan was appointed as the first Bren Professor of Chemistry in 1988.

9.

Peter Dervan served as Chair of Caltech's Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from 1994 to 1999.

10.

Peter Dervan has published more than 325 papers and taught hundreds of students.

11.

Peter Dervan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

12.

Peter Dervan is an elected member of the French Academy of Sciences and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina.

13.

Peter Dervan is a co-founder and founding member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Gilead Sciences.

14.

Peter Dervan served on the Board of Directors for Beckman Coulter beginning in 1997.

15.

Peter Dervan served as a Trustee of Yale University.

16.

Peter Dervan serves as a member of the Board of Scientific Governors of The Scripps Research Institute.

17.

Peter Dervan chose to apply ideas from synthetic chemistry to biology and the study of DNA, creating novel binding molecules to be used for DNA recognition.

18.

Peter Dervan's lab has identified pairing rules to control the DNA sequence specificity of minor-groove binding polyamides that contain the aromatic ring amino acids hydroxypyrrole, imidazole, and pyrrole.

19.

Peter Dervan has received a number of awards for both research and teaching, including those listed below.

20.

In 1990, Peter Dervan married Jacqueline Barton, a fellow chemist and professor at Caltech.

21.

Peter Dervan has a son, Andrew, from a previous marriage, and a daughter, Elizabeth, from his marriage with Barton.