Thomas Petes, PhD

Thomas D. Petes, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology (MGM) at Duke University Medical Center. He has served as chair since October 2004. He specializes in the study of yeast as a model for understanding genomic instability and chromosomal aberrations commonly found in cancer cells.

Petes's group has discovered striking similarities between yeast and human cells in the structure and function of proteins involved in DNA repair and in the protection of the tips of chromosomes. In turn, those similarities have yielded new insight into genetic defects underlying cancer. For example, yeast cells lacking particular DNA mismatch repair enzymes exhibit genetic instabilities also found in human colorectal cancer cells, a finding that suggested the repair defects might play an important role in the disease process.

Petes received his undergraduate education at Brown University and his PhD degree in genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle. He then went on to postdoctoral fellowships at the National Institute for Medical Research in London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From 1977 to 1988, Petes served as a professor of microbiology at the University of Chicago. He then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he served as a professor in the department of biology and was a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center from 1988 to 2004. He served as president of the Genetics Society of America in 2002, and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1999.