Pamela J. Bjorkman

Who is Pamela J. Bjorkman?

Pamela J. Bjorkman is an American biochemist. She is the Max Delbrück Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, Adjunct Professor of biochemistry at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research centers on the study of the three dimensional structures of proteins related to Class I MHC, or Major Histocompatibility Complex, proteins of the immune system. Bjorkman is most well known as a pioneer in the field of x-ray crystallography.

Bjorkman earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Oregon, under the guidance of Hayes Griffith and Patricia Jost. She received her PhD in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1984, where she worked in the laboratory of Don Wiley. She stayed on in Wiley's lab in a postdoctoral position where she ultimately solved the first crystal structure of an MHC protein - the HLA-A2 human histocompatibility antigen. This work was published in 1987, first at 3.5Å resolution and then refined at 2.6Å. Bjorkman continued her postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Mark Davis, studying the T-cell receptors that recognize antigens presented in the binding groove of MHC proteins. In 1989, she joined the Biology faculty at the California Institute of Technology as an associate professor. She earned tenure as a full professor in 1998, and became an HHMI investigator in 1999.