George Reeke, Jr.

George Reeke is Associate Professor with tenure and Head of the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at The Rockefeller University and a Senior Fellow of The Neurosciences Institute. He received his B.S. from Caltech (where he received the Baxter Prize for Undergraduate Research), his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Professor Reeke trained as a protein crystallographer with Dick Marsh at Caltech and Bill Lipscomb at Harvard, where his Ph.D. thesis contained one of the first atomic coordinate sets for any protein, that of the enzyme carboxypeptidase A. He was brought to Rockefeller University in 1970 by Gerald Edelman, with whom he collaborated in a series of studies on the three-dimensional structures of proteins of interest for understanding the function of the immune system. He developed one of the first microprocessor-controlled lab instruments, an X-ray camera, and his Fourier synthesis software was used to solve many protein structures worldwide.

Beginning in the late 1970’s, his interest has turned to problems of pattern recognition, perceptual categorization, and motor control, which he studies primarily through computer simulations of relevant neuronal systems. With Edelman’s group, he developed robots controlled by model brain-based networks; with Allan Coop, he developed a computationally efficient method for modeling the discharge activity of single neurons; with Coop, Wutu Lin, and Nick Watters, a series of methods for assessing the interval entropy of neuronal spike trains; with Valentin Piech, a model of low-level primate visual cortex; with Cameron Wellock, a model for song learning in birds and software for analyzing bird song; and with Kingsley Storer, a model for understanding the action of the anesthetic propofol on the central nervous system.

Dr. Reeke also directs the Peggy Rockefeller Concerts at The University, serves as a member of the editorial board of theJournal of Integrative Neuroscience, and is author of nearly 100 scientific papers.