Pete Stavropoulos

B.S., State University of New York, Stony Brook
Crystal Structure and Mechanism of Human Lysine-specific
Demethylase-1
presented by Günter Blobel

Pete had already a great deal of exposure to research when he joined Rockefeller’s  graduate program. His first experience in a laboratory was during his freshman year of undergraduate studies at Stony Brook. From that point on he became fascinated by research. He spent time in several laboratories, including that of Nouria Hernandez at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Serge Fuchs at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and Michel Nussenzweig here at Rockefeller. With each of these mentors, he coauthored papers. After joining my laboratory, I persuaded Pete to expand his research interests from biochemistry and molecular biology to structural biology.

He began his studies with a subcomplex of the nuclear pore. This work greatly contributed to the elucidation of the atomic structure of the subcomplex, and it was recently published in a seminal paper in Cell. Parallel to this project, he began to work on a chromatin-modifying enzyme, the histone demethylase LSD1, and solved its atomic structure. This work was published and was one of the top 10 most downloaded papers in 2007 in all of the Nature journals. Recently, Pete has solved the atomic structures of two more key proteins associated with chromatin and is now preparing this work for publication. Altogether, these are spectacular and extraordinary accomplishments. Key in this astounding productivity has been the collaboration and mentorship of André Hoelz, a postdoc in our laboratory who received his training from former Rockefeller University professor John Kuriyan.

Besides being so productive and creative at work, Pete is also an exemplary family man. He and his wife Vasiliki have a beautiful little boy named Angelo. Although born in America, Pete maintains close ties to his Greek heritage. Both his mother and father were born in Greece but are now residing in the United States. Pete loves his ancestral homes, which are located in Sparta and in a small village in Laconia. In addition, Vasiliki is from the Greek island of Chios. They now have three places to choose from when visiting Greece. Pete will stay on in our laboratory to complete his work.