Babis kalodimos

Dr. Kalodimos is the Chair of the Structural Biology Department at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, where he also holds the Joseph Simone Endowed Chair in Discovery Research. His research efforts focus on two major biological families: protein kinases and molecular chaperones. His group aims to understand at the atomic level how these proteins work by combining state-of-the-art NMR spectroscopy with other structural biology approaches, such as cryoEM and crystallography, to gain unprecedented insights into the sophisticated mechanisms of action. The group has been exploring rare conformational states that kinases transiently adopt as they function. These states have historically been difficult, if not impossible, to capture and visualize but his group has been successful in characterizing the different active and inactive conformations of kinases. In the molecular chaperone research, the group has spearheaded novel approaches that allowed determination of high-resolution structures and to observe how chaperones recognize and interact with proteins.