Peter Tattersall, PhD

Dr. Tattersall received his B.Sc. in Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 1968, and his doctorate from University College, London, England, in 1971, for studies on parvoviral DNA structure, replication and S-phase dependence, carried out at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), now Cancer UK. Then followed two years of postdoctoral fellowship at the Roche Institute of Molecular Biology, in Nutley, New Jersey, where he worked out the structural protein strategy of these viruses, and then two further years in Yale University’s Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry Department, where he formulated the rolling hairpin model for parvoviral DNA replication.

In 1975, he returned to the UK, working at the ICRF’s Mill Hill Laboratories on parvoviral interactions with differentiating cells. He moved back to Yale University in 1979, initially on the faculty of the Department of Genetics and then in Laboratory Medicine, where he was appointed professor in 1993.

His laboratory continues to focus its efforts on understanding the basis of selective oncotropism of rodent parvoviruses for human tumor cells, and the molecular mechanisms by which mammalian parvoviruses target and enter particular cell types, express their genes, take over their host cells and replicate their own DNA.