Joseph Loparo

Joe grew up Cleveland, OH where he attended Case Western Reserve University. At Case he developed a deep interest in using optical spectroscopy to probe the dynamics of molecules, spending four years in the laboratory of Cather Simpson where he studied the photophysics of metalloporphyrins. For his graduate work Joe joined the laboratory of Andrei Tokmakoff in the Dept. of Chemistry at MIT. While there Joe developed and applied ultrafast infrared spectroscopies to probe the dynamics of water's hydrogen bonding network, providing some of the first direct observations of the intermolecular motions of hydrogen bonded water molecules. Upon graduating Joe joined the lab of Antoine van Oijen, then at HMS, to apply his optical background to problems in mechanistic biochemistry. As a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow Joe studied the dynamics of the replisome the multiprotein machine that carries out DNA replication. In July 2010 he started his own lab at Harvard Medical School.