Cynthia Peterson
Associate NIMBioS Director for Graduate Education
Cynthia Peterson is Professor of Biochemistry, Cell and Molecular Biology
and Director of the Graduate Program in Genome Science and Technology
(GST) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Dr. Peterson's research focuses on the interactions among circulatory proteins and their role in regulating hemostasis, the inflammatory response, infectious disease, and the biological clock. These efforts integrate protein biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular, cell, and structural biology. She also has extensive knowledge regarding the application of computational methods to issues of structural biology. She has supervised the research of fifteen graduate and post doctoral students.
Dr. Peterson is committed to developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her undergraduate course on biomolecular structure/intermediary metabolism is taken by over 300 students annually. She offers graduate courses/seminars on enzyme/protein structure and mechanisms and emerging experimental/computational approaches for studying protein structure. She has been active in the UT/ORNL partnership, serving as an advisor for the Joint Institute of Biological Sciences, a reviewer for the Laboratory Director's Research and Development Funds for Functional Genomics, and Associate Director of the joint graduate Program in Genome Science and Technology. She was the UT representative for Science: Invest in the Future, a signature event of the Science Coalition, a national organization dedicated to the advancement of Science.
The Ethics and Communication course Dr. Peterson piloted in the GST Program helps students understand the impacts of science on their professional and personal lives. She was UT campus lead in submission of an NIH training grant entitled PEER (Program for Excellence and Equity in Research), which focused on expanding the participation of underrepresented minorities in graduate training for the STEM disciplines. She served as Principal Investigator on an NSF IGERT project entitled SCALE-IT (Scalable Computing and Leading Edge Innovative Technologies) for Biology and worked on a campus-wide committee to launch the Interdisciplinary Graduate Minor in Computational Science.
As Associate Director for Graduate Education, Dr. Peterson's commitment to building collaborations between UT and minority serving institutions will be of great value to the development of NIMBioS activities.
email: cbpeters_at_utk.edu
phone: 865-974-5148
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