Peter Anthony

B.S. 2004 Yale University

I grew up in Fairfax County, Virginia and went to college at the finest university in all of New Haven. While dodging bullets and braving picket lines, I majored in molecular biophysics and biochemistry and studied the chemistry and structure of the peptidyl transferase center of the ribosome under Prof. Scott Strobel. I also majored in economics, and had great fun writing about things like the Wankel rotary engine and the trans-Siberian railroad. But after much academic fooling around, I came to realize that biology is my only true love, and that I'm a reductionist (and physicist?) at heart.

After graduating in 2004, I mounted my Cannondale and rode off into the polluted Connecticut sunset, on a quest to find the triple point of science. Later that year, I crossed the desert, arrived in the promised land of California, and started the Ph.D. program in biophysics at Stanford. My search for the triple point has led me to the Block lab, which I joined in the summer of 2005, and continues to this day.

I work with Michael Woodside to measure the energy landscape of DNA and RNA hairpins as a function of sequence, force, and extension. We hope to apply what we've learned about secondary structure and folding to understand the physical properties of biologically-important RNA tetraloops, as well as higher-order nucleic acid structures such as tRNAs and ribozymes.