Peter C. Dedon BA, MD, PhD

Peter Dedon is the Underwood-Prescott Professor of Biological Engineering in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and a Principal Investigator in the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Infectious Disease IRG. He joined the MIT faculty in 1991, with an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology. His current research program addresses the chemical immunology of inflammation and the role of RNA and DNA modifications in microbial pathogenesis and human cancer biology. His research group recently discovered phosphorothioate and queuosine-like modifications in bacterial genomes, including the human microbiome. In collaboration with Tom Begley, his group used a systems-level analysis to discover a mechanism of translational control of cell response involving reprogramming of tRNA modifications and selective translation of codon-biased mRNAs for stress response proteins.