In 1849, when he was seven years old, JOSEPH R. DeLAMAR stowed away on a ship bound from his Amsterdam home for the Dutch Indies. The journey lasted 18 months, but he was eventually returned to his parents and to school. As a young man, he continued to seek adventure, immigrating to the United States, where he headed his own salvage company on Martha’s Vineyard. He sold the company–after nearly losing his life when he became trapped in the hold of a submerged ship–and went west, becoming a successful mine owner and Idaho state senator. Mr. DeLamar died in 1918 and left much of his substantial estate to be divided among “the three best medical schools of the day–Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and Columbia.” This bequest was a crucial factor in the School of Medicine’s ability to expand during the Depression. In addition to this professorship, the DeLamar Fund supports numerous teaching and research initiatives at the School of Medicine.
DeLamar Professorship in Biological Chemistry
School of Medicine
Established in 1918 by the estate of Joseph R. DeLamar
Held by Gerald W. Hart
GERALD WARREN HART, PhD is Professor and Director of Biological Chemistry at Johns Hopkins. He has served as the Director of the Department of Biological Chemistry for ~20 years. He is an Associate Editor of J. Biological Chemistry and of Molecular and Cellular Proteomics and an Editor of BBRC. He founded the journal Glycobiology in 1989, now the leading journal in the field, and served as its Editor-In-Chief for 12 years. Hart’s lab discovered O-GlcNAcylation; he co-led elucidation of GPI anchor biosynthesis with Paul Englund’s group, and his lab documented the importance of protein structure for N-glycosylation. His lab discovered the extensive crosstalk between O-GlcNAc and phosphorylation, which regulates transcription and signaling and underlies the etiology of diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, cardiovascular disease and cancer.