Prescott Deininger

Prescott Deininger, Ph.D., is Director of the Tulane Cancer Center and the Joe W. and Dorothy Dorsett Brown Foundation Chair in Oncology at Tulane University Health Sciences Center.

Dr. Deininger received his A.B. in chemistry from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1973 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in 1978. His graduate work concentrated on the sequence organization of the human genome. He carried out several years of postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a year as a NATO fellow at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, where he worked with Dr. Frederic Sanger, inventor of DNA sequencing and winner of two Nobel Prizes. During that time, Dr. Deininger invented the procedure currently in use for ‘shotgun’ sequencing of genomes.

In 1981, Dr. Deininger took a faculty position in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans where he advanced to professor. During a sabbatical year in 1990 as an ACS Distinguished Fellow with Dr. Charles Stiles at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Dr. Deininger developed the first dominant negative mutants for PDGF and patented the dominant negative mutant concept. Dr. Deininger joined Tulane as a professor and as the associate director for basic sciences of the Tulane Cancer Center in 1998. In this role, he developed the NIH-funded Center of Biomedical Research Excellence in Cancer Genetics. He was promoted to Director of the Tulane Cancer Center in 2007 and oversaw much of the post-Katrina rebuilding.

Dr. Deininger is a fellow of the AAAS and has served as journal editor and on numerous editorial boards, as well as served on numerous study sections. Last year he served on a National Academies committee to write a report on ‘Strengthening the Disaster Resilience of the Academic Biomedical Research Community.

Dr. Deininger’s laboratory has a long history of research on repetitive DNA and mobile elements in the human genome. The main focus is on the interaction of mobile elements with DNA repair and regulatory processes. In the course of this work, he has trained many outstanding researchers who now have their own active research laboratories.