Alan Hall
biologist
Alan Hall FRS (19 May 1952 – 3 May 2015) was a British cell biologist and a biology professor at the Sloan-Kettering Institute, where he was chair of the Cell Biology program. Hall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.
Early life and education
Hall was born in Barnsley in Yorkshire. He earned his BA in chemistry from Oxford University. He began his studies for a PhD at Oxford, but after two months he followed his major professor Jeremy R. Knowles to Harvard University, where he earned a PhD in biochemistry in 1977. He then took postdoctoral fellowships in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Zurich.
Career and research
Hall's PhD with Knowles was on the enzymology of β-lactamase, which led to his first paper being published in Nature in 1976. He used strains of E. coli with mutated β-lactamase, an antibiotic resistance enzyme, and assayed their activity in the presence of benzylpenicillin and cephalosporin C. Direct selection on these mutants allowed catalytic properties of β-lactamase to be identified and allowed structure-function relationships of the enzyme to be researched further. As a PhD student, Hall also published a paper on triosephosphate isomerase (TIM), which is a key enzyme in glycolysis. Specifically, he characterized the uncatalyzed interconversion of the two TIM substrates: dihydroxyacetone phosphate and glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate.
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