The Alumni Professorship Endowment Fund was authorized by the Executive Committee of the Faculty of the Medical School in 1978. The program was initiated to help attract and retain the most distinguished faculty. These professorships are funded by unrestricted gifts from medical school alumni and former house staff combined with gifts from friends of the School of Medicine. The Alumni Endowed Professorship in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics was established in 1993. It was the fifth professorship under this program. Dr. Elliot L. Elson was named the Alumni Endowed Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics in 2002.
Elson earned a bachelor’s degree in biochemical science from Harvard University in 1959 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University in 1966. Subsequently, he did postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego. After nine years on the chemistry faculty at Cornell University, he came to Washington University as professor of biological chemistry in 1979. After pioneering the development of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy and fluorescence photobleaching recovery at Cornell University, Professor Elson advanced this work at Washington University by creating a fluorescence imaging resource for the School of Medicine. He has also studied the movement and distribution of surface proteins, cell motility, and the forces determining the shapes of cells. He and his collaborators developed methods for the preparation of engineered tissue constructs and the measurement of their mechanical properties with a focus on the application of these for characterization of cellular and protein biophysics. This has led to a procedure for measuring the distinguishable contributions of the cells and the extracellular matrix to the overall mechanical properties of the constructs. In previous experiments he has applied these methods to study engineered heart tissues that mimic structural and mechanical properties of heart muscle and are assembled from connective tissue cells and cardiac muscle cells.
Dr. Elson is also a professor of biomedical engineering, mechanical engineering, and physics. He has published extensively and served on several editorial boards.