St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital / formerly MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Info
Endowed Chair in Biological Data Science, Director of the Center of Excellence for Data-Driven Discovery, and Senior Vice President and Chief Data Scientist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (joined 2020). Previously a program leader at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge for 14 years. His laboratory studies G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) using computational biology and experimental biology, establishing the role of intrinsically disordered regions (~40% of human proteins) in biological function and disease. Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Academy of Medical Sciences, and EMBO Gold Medal recipient.
DiffUSE relevance
Babu’s work on intrinsically disordered proteins represents one of the frontiers for diffuse scattering: IDRs and their conformational ensembles are difficult to study by conventional crystallography or cryo-EM, but their dynamics could leave signatures in diffuse scattering from crystals of IDR-containing proteins. His position as Chief Data Scientist at St. Jude also makes him a potential advocate for data governance and FAIR principles applied to structural dynamics data. He is at St. Jude alongside Marcus Fischer (multi-conformer crystallography).
Key Relationships
- St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital — SVP and Chief Data Scientist
- MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology — 14 years as program leader (connects to Garib Murshudov, Paul Emsley, Sjors Scheres at MRC-LMB)
- Marcus Fischer — St. Jude structural biology colleague
- GPCRs and intrinsically disordered proteins community
- Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
Sources
- Babu Lab at St. Jude: https://www.stjude.org/research/labs/babu-lab.html
- St. Jude profile: https://www.stjude.org/people/b/madan-babu.html
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Madan_Babu