The William Maul Measey Presidential Professorship of Physiology II
This Professorship was established in 2019, when the value of the endowment of the William Maul Measey Presidential Professorship of Physiology had increased sufficiently to support a second professorship. The original Professorship was established in 1998 through gifts from the Benjamin and Mary Siddons Measey Foundation in honor of William Maul Measey (1875–1967), an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania Law School Class of 1898.
William Maul Measey, a distinguished corporate attorney in Philadelphia, created the Benjamin and Mary Siddons Measey Foundation in 1958 to honor the memory of his parents. Since the Foundation supports several colleges, universities, schools of medicine, and hospitals in the Philadelphia area, the Measey name has become synonymous with the furtherance of medical education in the region.
Current Chairholder
Roberto Dominguez, PhD
Roberto Dominguez, PhD, is the William Maul Measey Presidential Professor of Physiology at the Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania. He was appointed to this position in October 2019.
Dr. Dominguez conducts research that has had a significant impact on the cytoskeletal field. Originally from Cuba, he completed his undergraduate education in the former USSR, where he received an MS degree in theoretical physics and mathematics from Odessa National University in Ukraine in 1987. After graduating, he made a serendipitous transition to the area of biophysics and biochemistry and discovered that biology was his real passion. He became fascinated by the atomic structures of biological macromolecules and how they help elucidate the function of proteins and serve as a platform for the discovery of drugs to treat human diseases.
He received predoctoral training at the University of Liège (Liège, Belgium), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (Heidelberg, Germany), and earned a PhD in Protein Crystallography and Biochemistry from the Pasteur Institute and the University of Paris-Sud (Paris, France) in 1996. Dr. Dominguez then completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Brandeis University, which resulted in the publication of the structure of the myosin motor at the beginning of the power stroke, considered one of the most important accomplishments in the field at the time.
In 1998, Dr. Dominguez joined the Boston Biomedical Research Institute as an independent investigator, and in 2006 he was recruited to join the Physiology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. The Dominguez lab, which has been continuously funded by the NIH, studies the structure and function of cytoskeletal proteins that control myriad cellular processes, such as cell locomotion and intracellular transport. Malfunction of cytoskeletal proteins is often associated with devastating diseases, such as cancer and several muscular, immune, and neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Dominguez uses a broad spectrum of experimental approaches, spanning structural biology, biochemistry, and cell biology, which allow his team to correlate structure to function and better understand how cytoskeletal proteins work and how they can be precisely targeted by drugs.
Presidential Professorships are awarded to exceptional scholars of any rank who will contribute to the diverse experiences, perspectives, and eminence of Penn faculty. They were established in 2011 to strengthen the University’s ability to recruit, retain and mentor distinguished scholars who are preeminent in their fields and have demonstrated a commitment to sustaining an inclusive and vibrant academic community.