George P. Hess

Above: Schematic of cell-flow flash photolysis set-up for measurement of agonist-induced currents in the millisecond time-scale.
Left: The whole-cell current recorded after flash photolysis of a "caged" acetylcholine analog equilibrated with the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on the surface of the clonal mammlian BC3H1 muscle cell.
Current Position
Professor of Biochemistry, Cornell University

Graduate Education
Ph.D. in Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley

Postdoctoral Experience
Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Honors and Awards
Professor Hess is a Professor of Biochemistry, Molecular and Cell Biology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been a John S. Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, a NIH Special Fellow, and a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Award. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and at Yale University; a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Arizona, Hawaii and Pennsylvania, and at MIT; and has twice been a U.S. State Department Cultural Exchange Professor in Europe. He has served on the Board of Reviewers of the Federation Proceedings, the Selection Committee of the Fulbright International Educational Exchange Program, as well as many panels of NIH and NSF, and is currently an Editor of the Journal of Protein Chemistry, a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Biochemistry, and a Corresponding Editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.



Selected Publications
Matsubara, N. and Hess, G.P. On the mechanism of a mammalian neuronal-type nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in PC12 cells: What can one learn from chemical kinetic measurements with a 20-millisecond time resolution? Biochemistry 31: 5477-5487 (1992).

Geetha, N. and Hess, G.P. On the mechanism of a mammalian g-aminobutyric acid receptor in primary brain cells. Chemical kinetic measurements with a 10-millisecond time resolution. Biochemistry 31: 5488-5499 (1992).

Matsubara, N., Billington, A.P. and Hess, G.P. Laser-pulse photolysis of caged carbamoylcholine in investigations of a mammalian nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in BC3H1 cells: What can one learn from chemical kinetic measurements in the microsecond time region? Biochemistry 31: 5507-5514 (1992).

Hess, G.P. Determination of the chemical mechanism of neurotransmitter receptor-mediated reactions by rapid chemical kinetic techniques. Biochemistry 32: 989-1000 (1993).

Niu, L. and Hess, G.P. An acetylcholine receptor regulatory site in BC3 H1 cells: Characterized by laser-pulse photolysis in the microsecond-to-millisecond time domain. Biochemistry 32: 3831-3835 (1993).

Ramesh, D., Wieboldt, R., Niu, L., Carpenter, B.K. and Hess, G.P. Photolysis of a new protecting group for the carboxyl function of neurotransmitters within 3 microseconds and with product quantum yield of 0.2. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 90: 11074-11078 (1993).



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