Jacquelyn S. Fetrow | |
|---|---|
| 15th President, Albright College | |
| Assumed office 2017 | |
| Preceded by | Lex O. McMillan III |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1960 (age 63–64) Pennsylvania |
| Spouse | Brian A. Kell |
| Parents |
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| Alma mater | Albright College (BS) Pennsylvania State University (PhD) |
| Profession |
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| Known for | Computational biophysics |
| Website | www |
Jacquelyn S. (Jacque) Fetrow (born 1960) is a computational biologist, college administrator, and the 15th president of Albright College.[1] Previously, she served as Provost, Vice President of Academic Affairs, and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Richmond, in Richmond, Virginia.[2] Prior to that appointment, she served as Dean of the College at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.[3] She also co-founded a company, GeneFormatics, for which she served as Director and Chief Scientific Officer for four years.
Fetrow is a native of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.[4] Her mother, Mildred F. Fetrow, was a public school teacher in the West Shore School District, teaching kindergarten, first grade and second grade for many years.[5] Her father, David E. Fetrow, was a carpenter. He also worked as a truck salesman, real estate salesman, and office manager.
Fetrow attended Camp Hill public schools through twelfth grade, Albright College for her bachelor's degree (Biochemistry), and Penn State College of Medicine for a Ph.D. (Biological Chemistry), which she earned in 1986 working with George D. Rose.[6][7] She did post-doctoral stints at the University of Rochester School of Medicine under the mentorship of Fred Sherman, and at the Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the tutelage of Peter S. Kim.
Fetrow worked at the University at Albany, SUNY, from 1990 to 1998, serving as assistant and then associate professor of biological sciences. She then accepted a position at The Scripps Research Institute. Technology that she helped develop at Scripps served as the foundation for GeneFormatics, Inc., the company that Fetrow co-founded and at which she served as Chief Scientific Officer and Director.[8] In August 2003 she was appointed Reynolds Professor of Computational Biophysics at Wake Forest University in the departments of Physics and Computer Science, and in January 2009 she was appointed as Dean of Wake Forest College. She moved to the University of Richmond to serve as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Richmond in 2014. In 2017 she was appointed president of her alma mater, Albright College.
Fetrow was the first to describe the non-regular protein structure, omega loop, a structure she identified and studied for her doctoral dissertation (work published under the name Jacquelyn F. Leszczynski).[9] Her early research work involved the experimental analysis of these structures in the protein cytochrome c.[10][11][12]
Later, Fetrow's work turned to the classification of functional sites in protein structures, resulting in Fuzzy Functional Forms[13] and active site profiling.[14] This work formed the foundation for the company she co-founded, GeneFormatics. Subsequent development of the active site profiling technology[15][16] was used to create the Peroxiredoxin Classification Index.[17][18][19] This technology has been used to cluster other superfamilies, including the enolases,[20] peroxiredoxins,[19] cytochrome P450s,[21] and arsenate reductases,[22] into functionally relevant clusters.