[bioundgrd] Amy Keating will be the next Biology department head!!!

[Alan D Grossman]

Dear members of the Biology community,

I’m delighted to share the news that Amy Keating has accepted an offer from Dean Nergis Mavalvala to become the next Biology department head, effective August 15!

Many of you already know Amy well. The Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, professor of biological engineering, and member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Amy joined the department as an assistant professor in 2002. Amy's research focuses on understanding how proteins select specific partners for interactions. That is, what are the sequence and structural determinants of specificity? She investigates protein–protein interactions by integrating data from high throughput assays, structural modeling, and bioinformatics with biochemical and biophysical experiments. Amy has co-taught our Graduate Biochemistry course for many years, and previously also taught in Computational Biology.

Amy's service to the department has been exemplary and will serve her well as department head. She currently co-directs (with Mary Gehring) our graduate program and is co-PI (with Steve Bell) of our graduate student training grant from NIGMS. She also serves as an associate department head. Amy's service has extended well beyond the department. She served on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on Graduate Advising and Mentoring, the search committee for the current Dean of Science, and on the VITAL committee to examine the state of Life Sciences at MIT. She recently served as President of the Protein Society. In these roles, Amy has had a tremendously positive impact on our department, the MIT community, and beyond.

I want to express my deep gratitude to Dean Mavalvala for her unwavering support of our department and for putting together a broad and inclusive committee to provide input on selecting the next Biology department head. This committee included faculty, staff, graduate student, and postdoc representation, and by all accounts it was a highly collegial effort. Being able to incorporate input from constituencies across the entire Biology community is an important inclusionary step, and a signal of our ability to work together to build a stronger community.

It has been an honor to serve as department head for the last eight years, and I thank each and every one of you for your contributions to making the department such an extraordinary place.

I am particularly excited to see Amy take the helm of biology, and look forward to the many ways she will help shape the department to be an even better place than it already is. Thank you Amy, for taking on this role!

Warmest regards,

Alan

Alan D. Grossman
Professor and Head
Department of Biology
Building 68-530
M.I.T.
Cambridge, MA   02139

adg at mit.edu<mailto:adg at mit.edu>
(617) 253-1515
Zoom: https://mit.zoom.us/my/alandgrossman

Please note: There is no need to respond to my emails outside of traditional work hours.







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