Dr. Philip Bevilacqua profile page

Phil graduated from North Collins High School in 1983. His undergraduate degree was from John Carroll University where he majored in Chemistry and minored in Physics, graduating in 1987. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester in 1993 where he developed fluorescence-detected stopped-flow techniques for RNA secondary and tertiary structure formation. His postdoctoral studies were at the University of Colorado, where he was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral fellow. There he worked on the then newly discovered dsRNA-binding domain and elucidated determinants of its substrate specificity. In 1997 he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Penn State University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. In 2003 he was promoted with tenure to Associate Professor of Chemistry and in 2007 he was promoted to Full Professor of Chemistry. In 2015 he obtained a partial appointment as Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology. He is a co-founder of the Center for RNA Molecular Biology at Penn State and is active in several interdepartmental graduate programs at Penn State including Plant Biology, Molecular Cellular and Integrative Biosciences (MCIBS), and Bioinformatics and Genomics. Beginning with his graduate work, through his post-doc, and into his independent career, Phil has focused on obtaining molecular insights into the myriad roles of RNA in biology through mechanistic approaches. The Bevilacqua lab has diverse interests in RNA that include ribozyme mechanism, pathways for RNA folding in vivo, RNA structure in living organisms, and roles for RNA on early Earth. His lab has introduced new approaches to study RNA, often in a collaborative fashion, including pKa measurements by diverse means; use of conformationally restricted nucleotides to probe RNA structure and function; probing of RNA folding across an entire transcriptome in vivo; and compartmentalizing and studying RNA function.