Members

Principal Investigator

Dr. Joel L. Pomerantz is an associate professor of biological chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a member of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. His research focuses on functional specificity and the design of signal transduction pathways. Dr. Pomerantz received his B.A. in biochemistry from Brandeis University in 1989 and completed his Ph.D. in biology in Phillip A. Sharp's laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995. He then completed two postdoctoral fellowships in biology, the first one at MIT with Carl O. Pabo in 1997 and the second in David Baltimore's laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in 2003. He joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins in 2004. His work examines the molecular machinery used by cells to interpret extracellular signals and transduce them to the nucleus to effect changes in gene expression, which results in a cell's decision to proliferate, differentiate, or die. The dysregulation of this machinery underlies the unwarranted expansion or destruction of cell numbers that occurs in human diseases like cancer, autoimmunity, hyperinflammatory states and neurodegenerative disease. Dr. Pomerantz is a member of the American Society for Microbiology and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and serves on the editorial boards of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He has authored or co-authored several peer-reviewed articles and one book chapter, has received numerous grants and awards and holds two patents.