Dr. Jeffrey M. Becker

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Jeffrey M. Becker is Professor and Head of the Department of Microbiology in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Becker received a BA in biology from Emory University and a PhD in microbiology from The University of Cincinnati. He was trained in biophysics at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel, as a Weizmann Fellow and a NATO/NSF Postdoctoral Fellow under Professors Ephraim Katzir and Meir Wilchek. After his post-doctoral fellowship, Dr. Becker was appointed Assistant Professor in Microbiology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1972. Dr. Becker's major research interests are in the structure and function of peptides and their receptors, membrane transport, and medical mycology.

Dr. Becker has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded grants for research from many agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Cancer Society, and the National Science Foundation. He was awarded a Research Career Development Award from NIH, was named an UT Chancellor's Research Scholar, and received UT’s Alexander Prize exemplifying the ideal teacher-scholar. He currently holds an NIH grant in the 30th year of continuous funding. He has served on many NIH study sections and currently serves on the editorial board of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and as Associate Editor of Microbiology. Dr. Becker has served as a consultant to the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly, Merck, Smith-Kline Beckman, Magainin Sciences, and Elitra. Dr. Becker was one of the four founders of a new biotechnology company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose goal was to find and develop new drugs for infectious diseases. That company, Mycopharmaceuticals, Inc., merged subsequently with Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

The research carried out in Dr. Becker's laboratory involves the molecular biology of membrane transport, the structure and function of peptide pheromones/hormones and their receptors, and the discovery of fungal virulence factors. Dr. Becker has trained over thirty doctoral students who have taken post-doctoral fellowships at institutions including U. California-Berkeley, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins, Case Western, Vanderbilt, Harvard, and CalTech,. His former students now hold faculty or staff positions at M.D. Anderson, St. Michael’s College, U. Alabama, National Cancer Institute, FDA, New Mexico State, Nebraska Wesleyan, Centers for Disease Control, Brown U., Clark Atlanta U., Rhodes College, St. Jude Research Hospital, Purdue, and Case Western.