Department of Chemistry welcomes Professor Karen Allen, world renowned crystallographer, to faculty
Karen Allen, a distinguished research scientist in biochemistry and structural biology has joined the Department of Chemistry. Most recently on the faculty of the Boston University Medical School, she has made seminal contributions to the understanding of protein structure and function through X-ray diffraction and chemical kinetic studies.
Professor Allen’s training spans the fields of biology (B.S. in Biology, Tufts University), biochemistry (Ph.D. in Biochemistry, Brandeis University), and protein structure determination (Postdoctoral Fellow with Greg Petsko, MIT). Hallmarks of her research are the ability to select protein targets of fundamental biological significance; carry out mechanistic enzymological studies that characterize a protein’s function; and through X-ray crystallographic investigations, elucidate the role of the protein’s structure in determining its function. Professor Allen extends her structural and functional analysis across families and superfamilies of proteins, providing insights into protein evolution that often reveal surprising links between proteins that are structurally similar but functionally disparate or vice versa.
In her pursuit of insights that come from interdisciplinary research, Professor Allen collaborates both within the Department of Chemistry (with Professors Liu and Whitty), as well as with other departments such as Biology (Professor Dean Tolan) and Biomedical Engineering (Professor Sandor Vajda). She is a member of Boston University’s Cell and Molecular Biology (CMBB) Program and the Bioinformatics Graduate Programs.
Professor Allen is a leader of the American Chemical Society, where she has served as Program Chair for the Biological Chemistry Division and is currently an Associate Editor of its prestigious journal, Biochemistry.
To learn more about the work of Professor Allen and her group, please click here.