Luke Rice PhD

Dr. Rice received his undergraduate degree from Yale, with a double major in Physics and in American Studies. For two years after that he worked as a scientific programmer in Axel Brunger’s lab at Yale, improving the performance of crystallographic refinement by adopting an algorithm from engineering disciplines that allowed more effective conformational sampling. Dr. Rice stayed at Yale for his graduate studies in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, continuing to work with Axel Brunger. His graduate work was mostly focused on biophysical and structural studies of yeast vesicular transport proteins (SNAREs and α-SNAP).

During his postdoctoral work with David Agard at UC San Francisco, Dr. Rice determined atomic structures of γ-tubulin, a specialized tubulin that catalyzes microtubule initiation in vivo. These and other experiments provided new insights into the mechanism of microtubule assembly because they showed, contrary to expectation, that the conformation of tubulins did not change as a function the nucleotide bound.