David A. Tirrell

Biosketch

David A. Tirrell is the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Carl and Shirley Larson Provostial Chair, and Provost at the California Institute of Technology. Tirrell was educated at MIT (S.B. Chemistry 1974) and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (Ph.D. Polymer Science and Engineering 1978). He joined the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1978, returned to Amherst in 1984, and served as Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UMass before moving to Pasadena in 1998. At Caltech, he has served as chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (1999-2009), director of the Beckman Institute (2011-2018) and provost (2017-present). Tirrell’s research interests lie in macromolecular chemistry and in the use of non-canonical amino acids to engineer and probe protein behavior. His contributions to these fields have been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and all three branches (Sciences, Engineering and Medicine) of the U.S. National Academies.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in macromolecular chemistry. I was trained as a polymer chemist, and began my career by working on the kinetics and mechanisms of polymerization reactions and polymer modification processes. When recombinant DNA methods became widely available in the 1980s, I began to explore the use of artificial genes to direct the synthesis of novel, well-defined macromolecules in bacterial cells. This approach to macromolecular synthesis allowed the polymer chemist, for the first time, the opportunity both to design a new structure and then to prepare that structure with essentially absolute control of the molecular architecture. Our initial targets were artificial proteins that form crystals, liquid crystals and gels of predetermined, programmable properties. More recently, we have focused on materials for use in surgery and regenerative medicine, the use of artificial amino acids to prepare proteins that behave in unusual ways, the evolution of proteins of novel composition, and the development of new approaches to the analysis of protein synthesis in cells.