Cheryl Arrowsmith

Cheryl Hillock Arrowsmith is an American-Canadian structural biologist. She is the Chief Scientist at the Toronto laboratory of the Structural Genomics Consortium. Her contributions to protein structural biology includes the use of NMR and X-ray crystallography to pursue structures of proteins on a proteome wide scale.

Early life and education

Arrowsmith was born in 1959 in Hackensack, New Jersey. She completed her Bachelor of Science degree at Allegheny College and her PhD in chemistry at the University of Toronto in 1987. While completing her PhD, Arrowsmith became interested in tumour suppressor p53 and related proteins after taking a course in nuclear magnetic resonance. This motivated her to complete her postdoctoral studies at Stanford University with Oleg Jardetzky in his Magnetic Resonance Lab.

Career

Her current research is to determine the 3-dimensional structures of human proteins of therapeutic relevance by structural proteomics. She has made significant contributions to epigenetic signaling in the context of drug discovery.
Arrowsmith was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015. She was also named as one of the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers in 2023. In 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.