|
|
|
| a |
 |
 Main Menu Home Research Publications Personnel Alice Y. Ting Contact Intranet |
|
Alice Ting was born in Chi-lung, Taiwan and moved with her family to the United States at the age of three. After growing up in Dallas, Texas, she spent the last two years of high school at the Texas Academy of Math and Science, on the campus of the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. There, she had her first exposure to experimental organic chemistry as she worked with Professor Roderick Bates to investigate the mechanisms of photochemically-controlled reactions. In 1992, she began her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Harvard. Working with Elias J. Corey, she helped clone the Schizosaccharomyces pombe gene for lanosterol synthase and develop new catalysts for the asymmetric dihydroxylation reaction. In her senior year, she also worked as a teaching assistant for Stuart Schreiber's Bio-organic Chemistry 27 class; this experience cemented her interest in chemical biology and led her to earn her Ph.D. at Berkeley with Peter G. Schultz. As a graduate student, Alice applied the technique of unnatural amino acid mutagenesis to measure the strengths of hydrogen bonds and cation-pi interactions in the context of natural proteins, and to study potassium channel selectivity, gating, and permeation in living cells in collaboration with Jian Yang at Columbia. She also began to cultivate an interest in biological spectroscopy, participating in one of the first single molecule fluorescence studies of proteins with the Weiss group at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Her interest in signal transduction was established in her final graduate project, a collaboration with Kevan Shokat of UCSF to re-engineer the ATP specificity of tyrosine kinases using phage display for the purpose of mapping direct phosphorylation targets in cells. After defending her thesis in 2000, Alice joined Roger Tsien's group at UCSD as a postdoctoral fellow. There, she combined her interests in spectroscopy and kinases by developing genetically-encoded fluorescent reporters for measuring kinase activities in living cells in real-time.
At MIT, Alice has developed a
research program at the interface of chemistry and biology, focused on the
development of new methodology for studying protein function and trafficking,
with molecular precision, in the live cell context. She has received a number of
awards, including the McKnight
Technological
Innovations in Neuroscience Award, the Technology Review TR35 Award, the Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, the
Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the NIH Career Development
Award, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. |
 |
