Biography

Christopher D. Lima is a Member and Chair of the Structural Biology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in New York City. He is a Professor of Biochemistry and Structural Biology at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences and Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. Graduate School of Medical Sciences of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He received his PhD in 1994 from Northwestern University for studies in the lab of Dr. Alfonso Mondragon where he investigated the structure and mechanism of E. coli topoisomerase I. After completing his postdoctoral studies in 1998 as a Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in the lab of Dr. Wayne A. Hendrickson lab at Columbia University he joined the faculty at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. He moved his laboratory to the Sloan Kettering Institute in 2003. Dr. Lima received the Louise and Allston Boyer Young Investigator Award, the Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the Rita Allen Scholar Award and was selected as a HHMI Investigator in 2013. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020. Since starting his lab, Dr. Lima’s research has focused on protein and RNA quality control pathways that contribute to RNA processing and decay and as well as post-translational protein modification and regulation by ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like proteins such as SUMO.