Professor Ronald Raines is the Henry Lardy Professor of Biochemistry and a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he has been a faculty member since 1989. He was born in New Jersey in 1958 and holds ScB degrees in chemistry and biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Christopher T. Walsh), and AM and PhD degrees from Harvard University (Jeremy R. Knowles). Raines completed his postdoctoral work as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow at the University of California, San Francisco (William J. Rutter).
Professor Raines is known as a leader in chemical biology for the wide-ranging impact his science has made at the interface of chemistry and biology; his research efforts have led to profound understanding and real-world applications in these areas. Raines and his group discovered an RNA-cleaving enzyme that is in human clinical trials as an anti-cancer agent, provided fundamental insight on the stability of collagen that resulted in the discovery of a new stabilizing chemical force in proteins (the n→π* interaction), and developed processes to synthesize proteins and convert crude biomass into useful fuels and chemicals.
Professor Raines is an author on more than 350 scientific articles and abstracts, inventor on 25 US patents, and founder of two companies. He serves on the editorial advisory board of several journals including Chemical Biology (ACS), Peptide Science, Protein Engineering, Design & Selection, and Protein Science. Raines has been recognized for his research with numerous awards including the ACS Repligen Award in Biological Chemistry, Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, and Pfizer Award, the Protein Society’s Emil Thomas Kaiser Award, and a Searle Scholar Award. Professor Raines was elected as a fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002), and is also a Guggenheim Fellow (2001-02) and Royal Society of Chemistry Fellow (2006).