The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology faculty members are vigorously engaged in research focused on understanding the biochemical and molecular bases of fundamentally important biological processes. Faculty and students in this department are working at the forefront of research to probe the molecular mechanisms of cancer, diabetes and obesity, neurological disorders, infectious diseases, and alcoholism.
The research programs of this department’s faculty span the breadth of modern biochemical research and faculty actively participate in inter-departmental research centers, including the Alcohol Research Center, the Cancer Center, the Center for Diabetes and Metabolic Disease and the Stark Neuroscience Institute. The specific areas of biochemical research include cellular signaling mechanisms, regulation of gene expression at the transcriptional and translational level, cell cycle regulation, DNA repair, metabolic regulation, macromolecular structure/function, chemical and structural biology, proteomics/genomics and the application of bioinformatics to relate functional changes in gene expression to underlying disease states.