Ronald T. Raines

Ronald T. Raines is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is also an Extramural Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. An author of over 400 peer-reviewed journal articles and an inventor on more than 60 US patents, Raines's transformative work in chemical biology has had a wide-ranging impact at the interface of chemistry and biology. With his research group, Raines discovered an RNA-cleaving enzyme that is in human clinical trials as an anti-cancer agent, provided fundamental insight into the stability of collagen that resulted in the discovery of a new stabilizing chemical force in proteins, and developed processes to synthesize proteins and convert crude biomass into valuable fuels and chemicals. Raines received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University and has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Royal Society of Chemistry Fellow, Royal Society of Biology Fellow, and Member of the National Academy of Inventors.