Jorg Stetefeld

Professor of Biochemistry - Tier-1 CRC in Structural Biology and Biophysics at University of Manitoba

Speaker

Dr. Jorg Stetefeld studies the structural and functional aspects of receptor-ligand interactions that play important roles in biology and human disease. To do this, he integrates traditional structural biology approaches with in-depth biophysical characterization.

The overarching goal is to obtain detailed mechanistic insights of how ligand binding is structurally coupled to receptor activation and to exploit this information to manipulate signaling with resulting in therapeutics. The Stetefeld laboratory focuses on “dependence receptors”, and their role in targeted apoptosis.

In a second avenue of research, the Stetefeld lab is developing nanotube devices based on the unique properties of coiled-coil domains from black smoker archaea bacteria. The goal here is to design and apply artificial S-layer components for targeted drug deliver, biomonitoring and remediation purposes. Since arrival at UM, Dr. Stetefeld has recruited ~$7.9M in infrastructure support, including grants from CFI (3), WED (2) and NSERC-RTI (8).

He successfully received ~$10.2M to establish his research program, including support from the CRC-program (3), CIHR (7), NSERC (6), Heart-and-Stroke Foundation (3) and Multiple Sclerosis Society Canada (1). Dr. Stetefeld has published over a hundred peer-reviewed research papers, including articles in Nature Communications (1), Cancer Cell (1), Nature Genetics (1), Nature Structural Biology (2), EMBO J (5), PNAS (1), NAR (4) and Matrix Biology (5) with >4000 citations (h-index:34/ 69) and he has filed three international patent applications. Since 2009, in total 13 graduate students finished successfully their MSc/PhD-thesis.