I would like to extend a warm welcome to all visitors and candidates for admission to the Department of Structural Biology. Our department was jointly founded over 35 years ago as the first of its kind in the United States by Roger Kornberg and Lubert Stryer, and soon established itself as a world leader in the study of the molecular and structural basis of biology. The discipline sits at the interface between physics, chemistry, and biology, as it attempts to explain both function and disease.

The department is consistently ranked first among the nation's Structural Biology graduate programs. Our faculty consists of one Nobel Laureate, three members of the National Academy of Sciences and three members of the Royal Society. Research in the department spans a broad swath of modern biology, including the molecular basis of transcription and translation, cell signaling, membrane protein structure and function, viral structural biology, the nature of host-pathogen interaction, nucleic acid biophysics, computational biology and immunology. Graduate students within the department are trained through multiple home programs at Stanford beyond Structural Biology, including Biophysics, Chemistry, Applied Physics and Immunology; this reflects the deep and diverse impact of Structural Biology on broader biomedical research.

Research in the department harnesses an outstanding infrastructure, including x-ray diffractometers, the beam lines at Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), NMR spectrometers, electron microscopes and computer clusters. We maintain broad collaborative interactions with a number of departments across Stanford University, including Chemistry, Physics, Bioengineering, Microbiology and Immunology, Developmental Biology, and Molecular & Cellular Physiology, to name just a few. Please feel free to contact me or my colleagues to further discuss our work.

Sincerely,

Joseph D. (Jody) Puglisi