Join us for a Q&A Webinar with Dr. Bil Clemons, a Black biophysicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Learn about his life and career trajectory with Black in Biophysics! 

Bil Clemons, the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, is a renowned structural biochemist who employs biophysical techniques to investigate the structure and biogenesis of membrane proteins. His lab's pioneering research includes the development of novel methods for expressing and characterizing membrane proteins, unraveling the mechanisms underlying the targeting of tail-anchored proteins to the ER, and advancing knowledge of peptidoglycan biosynthesis and N-linked glycosylation in bacteria.

Clemons received his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Utah while studying the structure of the bacterial ribosome at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. He then conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School, where he elucidated the atomic structure of the ubiquitous protein translocation channel, before joining the faculty at Caltech in 2005.

Over the course of his career, Clemons has received numerous accolades, including the NIH Pioneer Award from 2011-2016, the Searle Scholar Fellow from 2007-2010, the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences from 2005-2010, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Fellowship from 2002-2004, and the Max Perutz Award from the LMB in Cambridge. He was recently elected as an ASBMB fellow, and he chairs Caltech's President's Diversity Council and Protein Society DEI committee. In 2021, Clemons was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Clemons' research has contributed significantly to our understanding of membrane protein structure and biogenesis, glycobiology.