Michael K. Rosen PhD

Dr. Rosen is the Chair of the Department of Biophysics at UT Southwestern Medical Center and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Rosen received undergraduate degrees in chemistry and in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1987. He then spent a year in Alan Battersby’s lab in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge as a Winston Churchill Foundation Scholar. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1993 under the direction of Stuart Schreiber, where he studied the structure and function of the FK506 binding protein, FKBP12. He was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell post-doctoral fellow in the laboratories of Tony Pawson and Lewis Kay at the University of Toronto, where he studied the regulation of the signaling adaptor protein, Crk, and developed methods of selective methyl group labeling of proteins for NMR spectroscopy. Dr. Rosen started his independent laboratory in 1996 in the Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and moved to UTSW in 2001.

The Rosen lab seeks to understand the formation, regulation and functions of enigmatic, cellular compartments termed biomolecular condensates. These evolutionarily conserved structures concentrate diverse but specific groups of molecules without a surrounding membrane. Condensates appear to form through the physical process of liquid-liquid phase separation. Using a range of techniques, including biochemical reconstitution and in vitro and cellular microscopies, we investigate phase separation in both engineered and natural condensates.