Home | Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics | Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Welcome to the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics

As one of the first departments of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the nation, we are proud of our strong tradition of combining cutting-edge technology with impactful biology. We continue to leverage this interdisciplinary approach to yield break-through discoveries in biomedicine.

Our faculty of over 30 primary and secondary members cover a broad range of research areas, with particular strengths in structural biology, chemical biology, gene regulation and protein folding.

We are also the proud home of the Eldridge Reeves Johnson Research Foundation which offers advanced physical instrumentation and instruction to researchers across campus.

We are actively growing, with several recent hires, and our faculty are broadly engaged across campus with many joint appointments in other departments, institutes and centers.

We welcome you to learn more about our department in the following pages or contact us.

News & Publications

Shorter Lab in JACS
September 2020
Supramolecular Mechanism of Viral Envelope Disruption by Molecular Tweezers
Van Duyne Lab in Retrovirology
August 2020
Influence of the amino-terminal sequence on the structure and function of HIV integrase
Shorter Lab in Science Translational Medicine
September 2020
C9orf72 poly(GR) aggregation induces TDP-43 proteinopathy
Garcia receives HUPO award
September 2020
Congratulations to Ben Garcia, PhD, who was selected for the HUPO Discovery in Proteomic Sciences Award

Seminars & Events

FR&DD | Kathy Wu, PhD, Asst Prof, Grad Clinical Psychology, Widener University
Fri, September 25, 2020 | 4 pm • on Bluejeans
Resilience and Mental Health in a Time of Uncertainty
Raiziss Rounds/BMB Student Talks | Michael Z. Lin, PhD, Stanford
Thurs, October 1, 2020 | 12 noon • on Bluejeans
Synthetic Biochemistry: Engineering protein regulation for real-time investigation of biology

Faculty Spotlight

Yale Goldman

Yale E. Goldman, MD, PhD, is Professor of Physiology at the University of Pennsylvania and former Director of the Pennsylvania Muscle Institute.

His lab investigates muscle contraction, molecular motors, protein synthesis, and develops advanced methods in optical microscopy and single molecule biophysics. Novel biophysical techniques that lead to striking research findings have included laser photolysis of caged ATP, stable isotope oxygen exchange, polarized total internal fluorescence microscopy for single molecule structural dynamics, ultra-high speed optical traps, “parallax view” 3D tracking of single molecules, and alternating laser excitation (ALEX) microscopy for single molecule FRET measurements. The lab is currently investigating cardiac muscle contraction, including hypertrophic cardiomyopathies, mechano-biology of cellular gene expression and termination and read-through at premature mRNA stop codons that lead to truncated proteins in diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis.