Tom W. Muir

Biosketch

Tom W. Muir received his B.Sc in Chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the same institute in 1993 under the direction of the late Professor Robert Ramage, FRS. Following postdoc studies with Stephen B.H. Kent at The Scripps Research Institute, Muir joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1996, where he rose through the ranks eventually being appointed the Richard E. Salomon Family Professor and Director of the Pels Center of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Structural Biology. In 2011, Dr. Muir joined the faculty of Princeton University as the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of ’65 Professor of Chemistry, serving as Chair of the Chemistry Department from 2015-2020. Professor Muir has won a number of honors for his research, including; the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Award, Pew Scholar, the Leonidas Zervas Award in Peptide Chemistry, the Irving Sigal Award from the Protein Society, the 2008 Vincent du Vigneaud Award in Peptide Chemistry, the 2008 Blavatnik Award from the New York Academy of Sciences, a MERIT award from the NIH-GMS, the 2012 Jeremy Knowles Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2013 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, the 2016 Breslow Award in Biomimetic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, the 2017 E.T. Kaiser Award in Protein Chemistry from the Protein Society and the Ira Remsen Award, American Chemical Society, Maryland Section. Dr. Muir is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Science, the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Research Interests

A chemical biologist, Muir is well known for developing general methods for the preparation of proteins containing unnatural amino acids, post-translational modifications (PTMs) and isotopic probes. These chemical tools, now widely employed in academia and industry, have yielded detailed functional insights in many systems including protein kinases, ion channels and chromatin. His work on chromatin, which remains a major focus of his group, has yielded insights into many epigenetic processes, including how enzymes that act of chromatin are regulated by PTMs on histones and how cancer associated histone mutations corrupt transcriptional programs and transform cells. Muir is also well known for his work in the bacterial quorum sensing where over the course of more than two decades he has helped dissect the signaling pathways that control virulence in Staphylococci. This work has yielded detailed molecular mechanisms governing the biosynthesis of the active thiolactone-containing signaling peptides and how they regulate the virulence response through a two-component signaling cascade. Notably, this work yielded the first global inhibitors of a bacterial quorum sensing pathway and demonstrated that these molecules can prevent S. aureus infections in animals. The quorum sensing work also provided valuable reagents to the research community including the first antibodies against phosphohistidine.