Pamela J. Bjorkman
Pamela Jane Bjorkman ( Pamela Jane Bjorkman, born 1956 in Portland, Oregon) is an American biochemist and molecular biologist and professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Pasadena, California.
Life
Bjorkman earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon, and a Ph.D. in biochemistry at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a postdoctoral fellow, she worked at Don Craig Wiley at Harvard and Mark M. Davis at Stanford University in Stanford, California. Bjorkman 1989 received his own laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech ) in Pasadena, California. Since 1999, she also conducts research for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Work
Bjorkman is a pioneer of the crystallographic study of the major histocompatibility complex ( MHC). She was the first who was able to identify the crystal structure of a protein of the MHC (1987). Bjorkman is considered a leader in the study of structure, function and interaction of different proteins in the process of immune response.