Pamela J. Bjorkman

Pamela J. Bjorkman (also spelled Pamela J. Björkman) is the Max Delbrück Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Adjunct Professor of biochemistry at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Her research centers on the study of the three dimensional structures of proteins related to Class I MHC, or Major Histocompatibility Complex, proteins. Bjorkman is most well known as a pioneer in the field of x-ray crystallography.

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Bjorkman earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry at the University of Oregon, under the guidance of Hayes Griffith and Patricia Jost. She received her PhD in biochemistry at Harvard University in 1984, where she worked in the laboratory of Don Wiley. She stayed on in Wiley's lab in a postdoctoral position where she ultimately solved the structure of Class I MHC. This work was published in 1987, though Bjorkman left Harvard to continue her postdoctoral research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Mark Davis. In 1989, she joined the Biology faculty at the California Institute of Technology as an associate professor. She earned tenure as a full professor in 1998, and became an HHMI investigator in 1999.

She is doing research in structural biology to study the protein interactions involved in immune recognition, using techniques such as X-ray crystallography and confocal and electron microscopy.

Bjorkman has received numerous honors and awards during her research career, including the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1994 (jointly with Don Wiley), the AAI-PharMingen Investigator Award in 1996, and was appointed as a member of the US National Academy of Science in 2001. Most recently, she was the recipient of the L'Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science award (2006).

Bjorkman is married to the neurobiologist Kai Zinn, also a full professor at Caltech. Bjorkman and Zinn have two children.