Dr. Peter L. Davies is a Professor of Biochemistry at Queen’s University in Kingston who has recently completed his 3rd term as Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Protein Engineering. He is cross appointed in the Department of Biology and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2001. He has held visiting professorships in Singapore, Israel, New Zealand, and The Netherlands,

Peter received his B.Sc. from the University of Wales and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of British Columbia. He then did postdoctoral research in Lund, Sweden, and Calgary, Alberta, before joining Queen’s as an MRC Scholar and Assistant Professor some time before the turn of the century.

Peter specializes in protein biochemistry and the study of protein structure-function relationships. He has been recognized for his work on fish and insect antifreeze proteins and their interaction with ice. This has included their structure, mechanism of action, and evolution. His lab has researched other ice-binding and ice-nucleating proteins from plants and microorganisms. Peter’s group has also studied the structure, function, and mechanism of calpains, which are intracellular Ca2+-dependent cysteine proteases that mediate Ca2+ signaling. His group was the first to discover the activation mechanism of calpain and its structure after activation by Ca2+ and bound to its natural inhibitor, calpastatin. A new area of interest is in bacterial adhesion proteins and their relationship to biofilm formation, with the objective of blocking their ability to colonize surfaces.

Peter has published over 290 peer-reviewed papers, with 10 them appearing in Science or Nature.