Welcome to Dr. Becker's Lab Page

Dr. Jeffrey M. Becker is Chancellor's Professor and Head of the Department.  The research carried out in Dr. Becker's laboratory involves the molecular biology of membrane transport, the structure and function of peptide pheromones/hormones and their receptors, and the discovery of fungal virulence factors.  Dr. Becker has trained over thirty doctoral students who have taken post-doctoral fellowships at institutions including U. California-Berkeley, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins, Case Western, Vanderbilt, Harvard, and CalTech,. His former students now hold faculty or staff positions at St. Michael's College, U. Alabama, National Cancer Institute, FDA, New Mexico State, Nebraska Wesleyan, Centers for Disease Control, Brown U., Clark Atlanta U., Rhodes College, U. North Dakota, Purdue, and Case Western.  Undergraduate research is highly valued by Dr. Becker, who has mentored over 200 undergraduate students participating in research projects in his lab.

Dr. Becker has published over 240 peer-reviewed articles and has been awarded grants for research from many agencies including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the American Cancer Society, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Becker has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2011 Dr. Becker was named Chancellor's Professor, the highest lifetime honor that can be accorded to a member of the faculty of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

He currently holds an NIH grant in the 34th    year of continuous funding. He has served on many NIH study sections, currently serving on the Drug Discovery and Mechanisms of Antimicrobial Resistance panel, on the editorial board of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, and as Associate Editor of the journal Microbiology. Dr. Becker has served as a consultant to the pharmaceutical companies Eli Lilly, Merck, Smith-Kline Beckman, Magainin Sciences, and Elitra. Dr. Becker was one of the four founders of a new biotechnology company located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose goal was to find and develop new drugs for infectious diseases. That company, Mycopharmaceuticals, Inc., merged subsequently with Millenium Pharmaceuticals, Inc.