Executive Council

The Protein Society is governed by elected officers and an Executive Council. The officers are President, Secretary/Treasurer, and President-Elect. The President acts as the Chair of the Executive Council, which meets twice annually to vote on Society business and plan Society activities. Councilors serve in staggered 3-year terms to ensure continuity. The Executive Council is governed by The Protein Society's organizational Bylaws.

President: Dr. Amy Keating

Dr. Amy E. Keating, Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, serves as The Protein Society’s current President. 

Dr. Keating is interested in how proteins make specific interactions with one another and in how to reprogram protein domains or motifs to change their affinities or specificities. Her group develops experimental and computational methods for studying protein interactions and applies these methods alongside traditional biochemical, biophysical, and structural techniques to understand, predict and design new complexes. Dr. Keating is particularly interested in similarities and differences between the binding profiles of evolutionarily related protein family members. Her training in physics and chemistry makes her deeply curious about the specific structures and forces that underlie molecular recognition, and she is excited about opportunities for using increasing amounts of data - analyzed with appropriate computational tools - to provide novel prediction and design capabilities and new mechanistic insights. 

President-Elect: Charles (Chuck) R. Sanders

Dr. Charles R. Sanders is Professor of Biochemistry, holder of the Aileen M. Lange & Annie Mary Lyle Chair in Cardiovascular Research, and Associate Dean for Research in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences. 

Dr. Sanders is interested in determining the molecular biophysical mechanisms by which defects in membrane proteins contribute to human diseases, including cardiac arrhythmia, Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. Both the approaches developed for these studies and the results gleaned can be used to help support the practice of personalized (precision) medicine and to provide the basis for knowledge-based therapeutic strategies. Moreover, significant basic science advances often result from examining exactly what goes wrong when Nature makes mistakes.

Dr. Sanders was the recipient of the 2013 Hans Neurath Award of the Protein Society (shared with Jennifer Doudna) for his fundamental contributions to protein science.

Secretary/Treasurer: Dr. Jean Baum

Dr. Jean Baum now serves as Secretary/Treasurer for The Protein Society. The Secretary/Treasurer is the record-keeper and CFO for the Society, maintains records of Society business, acts as Chair of the Finance Committee, and is responsible for monitoring and reporting to the Executive Council on financial matters for a 3-year term.

Dr. Baum, Distinguished Professor at Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, received her A.B. from Barnard College, and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Her laboratory, The Baum Group, studies protein-protein interaction and protein aggregation through biochemical and biophysical techniques, including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.

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Term Ending 2024

President-Elect
Charles (Chuck) R. Sanders
Vanderbilt University 

Term Ending 2023

Secretary/Treasurer
Jean S. Baum
Rutgers University 

Councilor
Kouhei Tsumoto
The University of Tokyo

Term Ending 2022

Councilor
Carla Mattos
Northeastern University

Term Ending 2021

Councilor
Giovanna Ghirlanda
Arizona State University

Councilor
Elisabeth Sauer-Eriksson
Umea University