Bio
Peter McKinnon, PhD, is the Director of the Center for Pediatric Neurological Disease Research within the St Jude Pediatric Translational Neuroscience Initiative. He is also Vice-Chair of the Department of Cell and Molecular Biology. He received his PhD from Australia where he worked on chromatin structure in the childhood neurodegenerative syndrome, ataxia telangiectasia (A-T), subsequently developing an interest in the neurobiology of A-T. His postdoctoral work focused on molecular neurobiology and disease modeling using mouse genetics. Upon moving to St. Jude Children’s Hospital, he established a research program to study the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration in A-T. This work broadened to include multiple other pediatric neurodegenerative diseases that result from defective genome maintenance.