Ian Wilson

Who is Ian Wilson?

Ian Andrew Wilson is a professor and chair of the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, United States.

He received his B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 1971, his PhD degree in Molecular Biophysics from Oxford University in 1976 and did postdoctoral research at Harvard University from 1977-1982 on influenza virus hemagglutinin.

He then joined the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California in 1982 as an Assistant Professor and is currently Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. His laboratory focuses on the recognition of microbial pathogens by the immune system and has determined over 85 crystal structures of mouse, human, shark, and catalytic antibodies, with a variety of antigens, including steroids, peptides, carbohydrates and viral proteins, such as HIV-1 gp120 and gp41. His team was reported by the 6 February 2004 edition of Science magazine to have managed to synthesise the hemagglutinin protein responsible for the 1918 outbreak of Spanish Flu.

Since 2000, he has directed the Joint Center for Structural Genomics that has pioneered innovative new methods for high throughput structural studies, including x-ray and NMR. The JCSG has determined over 700 structures that focus on the expanding protein universe.