Constance Jeffery

Constance Jeffery

Constance Jeffery
Professor, Deptartment of Biological Sciences
University of Illinois, University of Illinois, USA

Biography

Prof. Constance J. Jeffery received her B.S. degree in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, Her graduate research, under the supervision of Daniel Koshland, focused on the transmembrane signaling mechanism of the bacterial aspartate receptor. She received a Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for postdoctoral studies with Greg Petsko and Dagmar Ringe at Brandeis University, where she studied protein X-ray crystallography. During that period, she worked on the crystal structure of phosphoglucose isomerase/autocrine motility factor, a cytosolic enzyme that is also an extracellular growth factor. Her work on phosphoglucose isomerase led her to coin the term moonlighting proteins. In 1999, she joined the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to continuing studies of phosphoglucose isomerase and other moonlighting proteins, her labs research interests include the structures and molecular mechanisms of cell surface receptors, transporters and other transmembrane proteins as well as other proteins involved in cancer and multidrug resistance.

Research Interest

The structures and molecular mechanisms of cell surface receptors, transporters and other transmembrane proteins as well as other proteins involved in cancer and multidrug resistance.