After spending almost his entire academic career at Johns Hopkins University as a student, researcher and administrator, Eaton Lattman has been lured away. The job, directing the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, is a perfect fit, he says, because the institute's research profile mirrors his work in structural biology. See CV
But an ambitious crystallography project, attempted at Johns Hopkins school of medicine in the 1980s, almost derailed Lattman's academic career. Ignoring advice that it would prove too difficult, he ambitiously tried to crystallize a virus called polyoma. He learned to grow mammalian cells and culture viruses, but couldn't grow crystals of sufficient quality for crystallography. His tenure was in jeopardy. Needing results quickly, Lattman began studying mutations that altered the folding of an already crystallized small protein: staphylococcal nuclease. After publishing a number of key papers in a short time, he earned tenure, and began studying the structure and function of proteins and RNA.
Lattman has long appreciated crystallography's challenges. After earning his BSc in chemistry and physics from Harvard College in 1962, he chose a PhD in biophysics at Johns Hopkins because the programme was one of the few to explore the growing field's variety of research areas. He excelled, creating a method to simplify the process of determining a crystal's structure; postdocs followed at Johns Hopkins and the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany. 'Lattman angles' are now used in crystallography computer programs around the world to display how molecules are oriented in space.
Lattman was later recruited to chair his former department, Johns Hopkins' Krieger School of Arts and Science, where he became his PhD adviser's boss. A series of retirements coupled with administrative mis-steps had left the biophysics department in a slump. Lattman hired new, diverse faculty to restore his graduate department's broad capabilities in biophysics.
Lattman now plans to strengthen Hauptman-Woodward by adding new investigators in areas such as computational biology and single-molecule diffraction, forging new collaborations with University of Buffalo researchers and raising endowments to guard against a nationwide funding crunch affecting many institutions. "Ed welcomes new ideas," says Johns Hopkins biophysics colleague George Rose. "And, importantly, he can instinctively spot the difference between a fresh approach and a quixotic gesture."
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2004–present: Dean of Research and Graduate Education, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland
1996–2004: Chair, Department of Biophysics, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University