Hashim M. Al-Hashimi

Hashim Al-Hashimi is the Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University. Al-Hashimi is also associate dean for biomedical graduate education at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of biomedical graduate training in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Institute for Basic Biomedical Science.

He is interested in developing a deep, quantitative, and predictive understanding of cellular processes based on the fundamental behaviors of nucleic acids and their interactions with protein binding partners. Over the past two decades, Al-Hashimi and his trainees developed approaches combining NMR spectroscopy, computational modeling, optical melting experiments, and chemical probing to determine 3D dynamic ensembles of RNA and DNA molecules at atomic resolution.

Al-Hashimi was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Greece, Italy, Jordan, and the UK. As a graduate student at Yale, Al-Hashimi helped develop residual dipolar coupling methodology, which revolutionized the study of protein structure and dynamics by NMR. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Al-Hashimi expanded the domain of applicability of these methods to nucleic acids. As a principal investigator, Al-Hashimi and his trainees discovered many of the ubiquitous motional modes underlying the biological activities of nucleic acids, with important implications for drug discovery and for understanding the mechanisms that cause genome instability and cancer. In 2009, Al-Hashimi co-founded Nymirum Inc to enable RNA-targeted drug discovery using RNA dynamics.