Donald Kirkpatrick, PhD

For over 20 years, Don has employed mass spectrometry proteomics to study ‘the most important protein in human cells’ – ubiquitin. As a National Hispanic Scholar, he earned a B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Oklahoma and received a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arizona. First as a Ph.D. student, and then as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School, Don published seminal work on polyubiquitin chains and the ubiquitination of proteins including EGFR and cyclin B. He continued this work during his 13 years as a group leader at Genentech, overseeing development of MS proteomics technologies and their application to drug discovery. Don has published more than 90 peer reviewed papers and served on the editorial boards for Molecular & Cellular Proteomics and the Journal of Proteome Research. In addition to ubiquitin, Don is passionate about Dodger baseball, Sooner football and spending time in the Colorado mountains with his four children.