Steven Pelech

Dr. Steven Pelech is a full professor in the Division of Neurology in the Department of Medicine at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he has been on faculty since 1988. He was the principal founder of Kinetek Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, which were spin-out companies from his UBC academic research. He was one of the founding scientists of the Biomedical Research Center at UBC. Prior to his academic and industrial experience, he spent five years in post-doctoral training with Sir Philip Cohen at the University of Dundee in Scotland and Nobel laureate Dr. Edwin Krebs at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Pelech received his B.Sc. (Hon) and PhD degrees in biochemistry from UBC.

Dr. Pelech has authored over 240 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters about signal transduction and is one of the discoverers of the MAP kinase family of cell signalling proteins. He has also contributed 280 blog commentaries on the GenomeWeb website and created the SigNET KnowledgeBank with 11 open-access websites containing over three million webpages of scientific information about genes, proteins and drugs. His accolades include the 1993 Martin F. Hoffman Award for Research at UBC and the 1993 Merck Frosst Canada Prize from the Canadian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He is the 2001 Distinguished Lecturer for the Faculty of Medicine at UBC for the basic sciences. He has served on grant review panels for the US National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Research Council of Canada, the Michael Smith Health Research Foundation, Genome Alberta, Genome Prairie, the Canadian National Cancer Institute, the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation and the American Heart Association. He has acted as an external reviewer for 22 other agencies including the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Israel Science Foundation and also been an external reviewer for over 28 scientific journals