Rate My Professor Milan Mrksich

The research of the Mrksich Group operates at the interface of chemistry, biology, and engineering, developing self-assembled monolayers of alkanethiolates on gold as model biointerfaces; dynamic substrates that switch ligand activities with electrical or optical signals to study cell responses; biochip arrays analyzed by SAMDI mass spectrometry for label-free high-throughput screening of enzymatic reactions and protein modifications; and megamolecules—fusion protein architectures assembled via covalent inhibitors for complex structures used in diagnostics, therapeutics, and synthetic biology. Key contributions include mimics of the extracellular matrix for novel cell adhesion ligands and SAMDI-MS for functional annotation of genes and protein acetylation networks. Representative publications are 'Design and Synthesis of Megamolecule Mimics of a Therapeutic Antibody' (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2020), 'Solid-Phase Synthesis of Megamolecules' (JACS, 2020), 'Sequential Glycosylation of Proteins with Substrate-Specific N-Glycosyltransferases' (ACS Central Science, 2020), 'High-throughput mapping of CoA metabolites by SAMDI-MS to optimize the cell-free biosynthesis of HMG-CoA' (Science Advances, 2019), and 'Synthesis of Cyclic Megamolecules' (JACS, 2018). His honors include the 2020 Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award, 2016 iBIO iCON Innovator Award, 2012 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellowship, 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship, 2003 ACS Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award, 2000 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 2000 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, 1996-1999 Searle Scholar Award, and others.