Stephen G. Sligar

Biosketch

Sligar earned his bachelor’s degree from Drexel University, working in the field of EPR spectroscopy with Haywood Blum and solid state metal defects with Jim Jackson. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois, working first in astrophysics with Fred Lamb, then biophysics in the group led by Peter Debrunner, Hans Frauenfelder and I. C. Gunsalus. He served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. He returned to the University of Illinois where he was the I. C. Gunsalus Professor of Biochemistry, the William and Janet Lycan Professor of Chemistry and Director of the School of Chemical Sciences. He also held the University of Illinois Swanlund Endowed Chair, was Director of the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology and is a professor in the Illinois Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology. Dr. Sligar is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, an Fellow of the Biophysical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was an Academic Leadership Program Fellow with the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Awards include the 2020 Christian Anfinsen Award from the Protein Society, the 2016 Sober Award from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, a Fulbright Scholarship to France, a Senior Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Bert L. and Kuggie Vallee Visiting Professor in Inorganic Chemistry at Oxford. He is also a Fellow in the Jerome Karle Nobel Laureate World Innovation Foundation.

Research Interests

With senior research scientists, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, Dr. Sligar has been able to successfully unravel key mechanistic details in a variety of systems important to human health and disease. On multiple occasions, his investigations required developing new approaches to advance molecular understandings. Applying these new tools was not only of benefit to the initial project, but also enabled him to apply them to different systems and questions. This has led to an unusually broad portfolio of research contributions, further enabled by the receipt of an NIH MIRA award. Historic accomplishments include being the first to synthesize and microbially express eukaryotic metalloprotein genes (cytochromes, sperm whale myoglobin and human hemoglobin), applying optical and resonance spectroscopies to questions of metalloenzyme structure/function and the use of biophysical techniques such as high pressure, cryoenzymology, fluorescence methods and x-ray scattering to reveal mechanistic details of catalysis and molecular recognition. Using these approaches, Dr. Sligar has been able to help reveal the bio-inorganic mechanisms of the cytochrome P450 oxygenases involved in human drug metabolism and hormone biosynthesis. He discovered and developed the Nanodisc system that self-assembles a plethora of integral membrane proteins into soluble bilayers allowing scientists to investigate integral membrane protein function and used the Nanodisc as a membrane surface of defined composition to reveal the role of the membrane in integrin and Ras dependent signaling.