Dominic Esposito BA, PhD

Dr. Esposito is currently the Director of the Protein Expression Laboratory (PEL) and Project Lead for the RAS Reference Reagents Program at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research in Frederick, Maryland. Dr. Esposito’s group is responsible for cloning, expression, and purifying proteins from a variety of host organisms in support of the NCI RAS Initiative, and for investigators at the National Cancer Institute and other NIH facilities. In addition, the PEL invents and develops novel technologies for improving protein expression and production, focused heavily on baculovirus expression technology and combinatorial cloning. Prior to his role as director, Dr. Esposito led the Clone Optimization Group in the PEL for 9 years and was responsible for the generation of over 15,000 expression clones, 400 new expression vectors, and several technological innovations in protein expression. Dr. Esposito received his B.A. in Chemistry at La Salle University in Philadelphia, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in the laboratory of Dr. John Scocca at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School where he studied bacteriophage site-specific recombination. Dr. Esposito then worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Craigie at the NIDDK, where he studied the protein-DNA interactions involved in the HIV viral integration reaction. Prior to joining the FNL in 2001, Dr. Esposito worked for three years as a Staff Scientist in the Protein Engineering group at Life Technologies, where he helped to develop the Gateway recombinational cloning system.