Stephen R Sprang

I am the director of an interdepartmental Center for Biomolecular Structure and Dynamics at the University of Montana. We are broadly interested in the biophysical mechanisms that underlie cellular processes. My research over the years has been to understand how cells use specialized proteins to communicate with each other and to control cellular processes. A specific topic has been the biochemical signaling cascade that is stimulated by the adrenalin receptor. My lab uses X-ray crystallography to obtain images of proteins in action at atomic resolution.

After receiving my BS in Biochemistry at Cal State LA, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin to earn a Ph.D. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and then at UC San Francisco. For twenty years thereafter I was a member of the Biochemistry Faculty at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Finally, tired of suburbia, my wife and I started a new life in Montana, where we live on the slope of St Mary's peak in Stevensville in the Bitterroot Valley, and work as scientists at the University of Montana.

My mother, recently separated, moved our small family from Altadena to South Pasadena around 1957. Her roots were in St Louis, and she moved, as an adult, to California in the thirties, in that great migration of mid-westerners who sought to find new lives in the West. When I was growing up, we had no other relatives in SP, but several in the LA basin, Lake Arrowhead, and Orange County. My father was a Cincinnati native, and he and my mother met and married in California.