John Kuriyan 51st Lorne Proteins Conference 2026

John Kuriyan

John Kuriyan earned his Ph.D. in 1986 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, working under the supervision of Gregory A. Petsko and Martin Karplus (Harvard University). He was appointed to the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1987 and promoted to full professor there in 1993. In 2001 Kuriyan moved to The University of California, Berkeley as Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology and Chemistry and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He joined Vanderbilt University in 2023 as Dean of the School of Medicine Basic Sciences. Kuriyan studies the enzymes and molecular switches driving cell signaling and DNA replication. His lab combines protein 3D structures with biochemical, biophysical, and cellular analyses to reveal mechanisms. They uncovered how tyrosine kinases—Src family, Abl, and EGFR—toggle activity, informing cancer drug design and explaining why Novartis’s Gleevec and Scemblix disable oncogenic Abl. They also elucidated regulatory mechanisms of STATs, SOS, CaMKII and the structural basis of rapid DNA replication. Kuriyan is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2001), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2008), a Foreign Member of The Royal Society of London (2015), and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine (2018).