Peter Devreotes

Peter Devreotes is Isaac Morris and Lucille Elizabeth Hay Professor and Director of the Department of Cell Biology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, he joined the Department of Biological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins. From 1990 to 2000, he served as Director of the Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology Graduate Program. In 2000, he became Director of the Department of Cell Biology. Devreotes' research focuses on understanding how cells sense their surroundings and move towards chemical stimuli. Chemotaxis is critical for morphogenesis in development, immune cell trafficking, stem cell homing, and wound healing, and it is exploited in disease states such as cancer metastasis. Devreotes was the first to identify chemoattractant receptors and to demonstrate that signaling events occur selectively at the cell’s leading edge, studies that have led to the most definite understanding of the strategy that cells use to sense direction. A recognized international leader in his field, Devreotes is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has served on the Council of the American Society for Cell Biology, the Advisory Boards of the Cell Migration Consortium, and the Searle Scholar Program. He has presented over 400 invited lectures, including plenary or keynote lectures at major international conferences. He founded the Gordon Conference on "Gradient Sensing and Directed Cell Migration." He is the author of more than 230 research articles, reviews, and book chapters, and has trained over 60 pre-and postdoctoral fellows.