Scott Blanchard received his Ph.D. in the Program in Biophysics from Stanford University School of Medicine in 2002. There he worked under the direction of Dr. Joseph Puglisi during his thesis research focusing on the structure and function of RNA. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell in July of 2004, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University under the supervision of Dr. Steven Chu. During this period, he was able to make the first demonstrations that the ribosome and mechanism of translation were amenable to single-molecule interrogations.

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From 2004-2019, Scott was a Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) located within the Tri-Institutional Network that includes Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and The Rockefeller University on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. From 2014-2019, he served as Associate Director of The Tri-Institutional PhD Program in Chemical Biology. In June of 2019, Scott was appointed a Member of the Department of Structural Biology at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where his lab continues their efforts to understand the molecular basis of regulation and disease and where he oversees the Center for Single-Molecule Imaging. The lab website can be found here:

 

(https://www.stjude.org/research/labs/blanchard-lab.html)

 

Research in the Blanchard laboratory focuses on examining structure-function relationships in macromolecular assemblies, including bacterial and human ribosomes as well as integral membrane proteins, using a variety of genetic, biochemical, and spectroscopic approaches. A principal goal of these investigations is to reveal regulatory paradigms that explain how cellular factors and small-molecules affect the function of essential molecular machines. We seek to leverage these information to improve the efficacy of clinical interventions for the betterment of patient care.