2009 Boomerang Award: Richard Baxter

University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Born and raised in Tasmania, Richard Baxter attended the Australian National University as a National Undergratuate Scholar, receiving his BSc(Hons) in 1998. His first taste of biochemistry and biophysics was his Honours research on the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II, supervised by Dr Ron Pace, Dr Elmars Krausz and Dr Tom Wydryzynski. Richard received the Brian Ledley Scholarship from the Gowrie Trust Fund to pursue his PhD in chemistry at the University of Chicago, graduating in 2004. It was in Chicago that Richard was trained in X-ray crystallography by Professor James R. Norris (Chemistry) and Professor Keith Moffat (Biochemistry), and performed a time-resolved crystallographic study of the bacterial photosynthetic reaction center, the first such study of an integral membrane protein.

Following his PhD, Richard joined the laboratory of Professor Johann Deisenhofer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he currently studies proteins involved in the innate immune response of mosquitoes to malaria. He determined the structure of thioester-containing protein 1 (TEP1), a homologue of mammalian complement factors and a central molecule responsible for the killing of ookinetes following their traversal of the mosquito midgut epithelium. Richard’s current focus is the elucidation of other proteins interacting with TEP1 and the mechanism of TEP-dependent killing.

Although it has been over ten years since he left Australia, Richard has fond memories of his training and is looking forward to the chance to return on the Boomerang Award. Having switched fields since starting his postdoctoral fellowship, Richard is looking forward to meeting new people at ComBio2009.

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This page last modified: April 25, 2009.