Biology professor earns honors

Our undergraduate faculty boasts two Nobel Prize winners, a Pulitzer Prize Winner, five MacArthur Fellows, three National Medal of Science Winners, and 14 National Academy of Science members, and these are only the awards that most people would have heard of.

Every year, however, dozen more Hopkins faculty members are granted awards that are less well known.

This summer, a Hopkins faculty member received his second award from the Calorimetry Conference Board of Directors, placing him among the best in his field.

Dr. Peter Privalov is a professor who has joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins Departments of Biology and Biophysics.

Privalov's research has not only advanced the area of science that he works in, he has spent almost fifty years making breakthroughs in a field which did not even previously exist.

If you have ever taken a physics class, you probably know that heat is a form of energy.

Thinking about it on a large scale, it makes a lot of sense. Our bodies heat up when we exercise; two pieces of metal heat up when you rub them together.

You may be surprised to hear, however, that this same process occurs at the tiniest molecular level.

In general, molecules are made up of building blocks that are held together by chemical bonds.

For example, all proteins are made up of amino acids held together by bonds called peptide bonds. When these bonds are formed or broken, energy is either used or released as heat.

Depending on the type of molecule and its structure, all molecules will cause a different change in heat.

The science of studying the heat of a reaction is called calorimetry and Privalov has been involved in how to use calorimetry to study not simply chemical reactions in a beaker but biological reactions.

Dr. Privalov was received both his B.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Georgia, Tbilisi in the former USSR.

His earliest papers, published in Russian in the Russian journal Biofizika, date back to the 1950s and 60s, when calorimetry was still a very newly emerging idea. Privalov started using the idea of using calorimetry to track the unfolding state of a protein.

Proteins are originally constructed in a cell as a linear chain of amino acids. However, they adopt unique folded up structures based on this sequence of amino acids. It is not fully understood how they go about folding into this final structure.

Privalov has long been using changes in heat to track the folding process, as well as the unfolding process that occurs when the protein is exposed to heat, acid, or other chemicals that break up the structure.

Besides using calorimetry for studying protein folding, Privalov has also investigated how to use changes in temperature to study RNA and DNA folding, as well as the association of molecules with each other. Since all of these things involve making or breaking bonds, they will all show characteristic temperature changes.

In addition to authoring over 100 papers in the field of calorimetry, Privalov has developed patented techniques and devices used by scientists worldwide in the field of calorimetry.

These methods and products have allowed calorimetry to become a precise science where tiny measurements in temperature can be analyzed.

For his work, Privalov was previously awarded the Hugh Huffman Memorial Award, the most prestigious at the calorimetry conferences.

With his addition of the 2004 James J. Christensen Award, Privalov is one of few distinguished scientists who have received both the Huffman and Christensen Awards from the Calorimetry Conference.