About

James P. Allen is a Professor of Molecular Sciences at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego. His research has focused on energy transduction processes in photosynthesis, particularly on the ability of the bacterial reaction center, a pigment-protein complex, to perform the primary processes in photosynthesis, which involve the conversion of light energy into a charge-separated state. His group has recently concentrated on creating new electron and proton transfer reactions in artificial and hybrid proteins with the aim of mimicking key bioenergetic processes in biological organisms. His research objectives broadly encompass understanding protein functions in biological systems, ranging from energy conversion in photosynthetic systems to the structural changes in proteins that can cause diseases. He employs biochemical and biophysical approaches, including x-ray crystallography and spectroscopic measurements, to relate protein structure to function. His work on photosynthetic complexes aims to develop models for electron and energy transfer, especially to understand how these processes evolved from primitive bacteria to cyanobacteria and plants. Additionally, he designs artificial proteins with manganese cofactors to study redox catalysis and applies these insights to artificial systems, advancing the understanding of bioenergetic processes.

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Computer science
• Photochemistry
• Crystallography
• Linguistics

Frequent coauthors

• J. C. Williams

  Arizona State University

  87 shared

• Wolfgang Lubitz

  56 shared

• JoAnn C. Williams

  Arizona State University

  47 shared

• Frank Müh

  Johannes Kepler University of Linz

  45 shared

• James C. Williams

  Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis

  43 shared

• J. Breton

  Institut de Physique de Rennes

  40 shared

• E. Nabedryk

  Freie Universität Berlin

  40 shared

• William W. Parson

  University of Washington

  37 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana

  1982

Similar researchers at Arizona State University

• Greg Asnerh-157
• Philip Christensenh-130
• Jianguo Wuh-119
• Carolyn Comptonh-118
• Osvaldo Salah-114