-
Professor Joachim Frank
Dr. Joachim Frank is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and a Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. He worked on his dissertation under Professor Walter Hoppe’s mentorship at the Max Planck Institute for Protein and Leather Research in Munich (the predecessor of the MPI for Biochemistry in Martinsried) and, in 1970, received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Munich. A two-year Harkness Fellowship allowed him to visit three labs in the USA for postdoctoral research. After a brief return to Martinsried he spent three years at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge working as a Senior Research Assistant in the lab of Dr. Vernon Ellis Cosslett. In 1975 he joined the Wadsworth Center in Albany as a Senior Research Scientist. In 1985 he joined the Biomedical Sciences faculty in the newly founded School of Public Health of SUNY Albany. In 2008 he moved to New York to assume his current positions. From 1998 to 2017 Dr. Frank was supported as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Dr. Frank’s lab has developed techniques of electron microscopy and single-particle reconstruction of biological macromolecules, specializing in the mathematical and computational approaches. He has applied these techniques of visualization to explore the structure and dynamics of the ribosome during the process of protein synthesis and the structure and gating mechanisms of several ion channels.
Dr. Frank is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Microbiology. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was honored for his contributions to the development of cryo-EM of biological molecules and the study of protein synthesis with the 2014 Franklin Medal for Life Science. In 2017 he shared the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences with Richard Henderson and Marin van Heel. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Richard Henderson and Jacques Dubochet.