Biography - Gerald Stubbs

Gerald Stubbs was born in Hobart, Australia, and majored in chemistry at the Australian National University, graduating in 1968. He received a D. Phil. in molecular biophysics from the University of Oxford in 1972, and then joined the scientific staff of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, working on the structure of TMV under Ken Holmes, who had been Rosalind Franklin’s last graduate student. He was at Brandeis University in Don Caspar’s group from 1977 to 1983. Don Caspar had been a friend and close collaborator with Rosalind. In 1983 he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University.

In his early career, Professor Stubbs was best known for determining the structure of TMV, the first virus to be described in molecular detail, and for many years the only virus for which the structural interactions between the coat protein and the nucleic acid had been observed. This structure was described in a series of papers in Nature and Science in 1975, 1977, and 1986. He also developed much of the fiber diffraction methodology used to determine this and other structures. His later research extended this work to other filamentous viruses, and he added cryo-electron microscopy in combination with fiber diffraction to his experimental approach. In his later work he applied the methods he had developed for filamentous viruses to prions and amyloids.

He served on two occasions as chair of the Fiber Diffraction Special Interest Group of the ACA.

He retired in 2017.