Moffat named first Deputy Provost for Research at University

Keith Moffat, the Louis Block Professor in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, began serving Monday, July 1, as Deputy Provost for Research.

Keith Moffat, the Louis Block Professor in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and a founding member of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University, began Monday, July 1, serving his three-year term as Deputy Provost for Research.

In addition to assisting Richard Saller, University Provost, with academic, personnel and administrative issues, Moffat will oversee University research administration and will serve on a newly created Science Council, which will set priorities and develop strategies for scientific research at the University and at Argonne National Laboratory.

“I’m confident that Keith’s familiarity with interdisciplinary research in the sciences at the University and at Argonne will serve us well in his new capacity as deputy provost,” Saller said. “I’m looking forward to working more closely with him on these matters.”

Moffat graduated with first-class honors in physics from the University of Edinburgh and obtained his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in biophysics, studying at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Before coming to Chicago in 1990, Moffat was a faculty member at Cornell University, where he developed MacCHESS, among the world’s first synchrotron facilities to serve structural biologists.

He has pioneered the application of synchrotron radiation to time-resolved biological crystallography, with the goal of understanding the short-lived structural changes that accompany all chemical and biochemical reactions.

At the University, Moffat heads BioCARS, the structural biology component of the interdisciplinary Consortium for Advanced Radiation Sources, which he directed from 1993 to 2000.

BioCARS, funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health, is an international research facility serving structural biologists from the United States, Australia, Canada and Europe.

Moffat, a former Guggenheim Fellow, currently holds a MERIT Award from the NIH and serves on the Board of Governors for Argonne and its Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee. Also, he is on the Structural Biology Advisory Panel for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.