Tufts University School of Medicine first established a Department of Microbiology in 1962 at the time that J. T. (Ted) Park was recruited to serve as the first Chair.  Park was already well-known as a distinguished microbial biochemist for his discovery that the bacterial cell wall is synthesized from nucleotide-linked precursors (then called Park nucleotides and now known as nucleotide sugars) and for his demonstration that penicillin kills bacteria by inhibiting their ability to synthesize the cell wall.  Park recruited six additional faculty members over the course of the next six years.  The first of these was Moselio Schaechter, a microbial physiologist who had described the essential parameters of bacterial growth during training in the laboratory of the Danish microbiologist, Ole Maaløe.  Next, H. Vasken Aposhian, a virologist, left Arthur Kornberg's group at Stanford, to join our faculty.  Aposhian left in 1970 to become Department Chair at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  In 1965, Edward Goldberg was induced to leave Alfred Hershey's lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to set up a lab at Tufts studying phage genetics, transcription and morphogenesis.  Michael Malamy was recruited in 1966, after completing postdoctoral training at Princeton, with Arthur Pardee, and at the Institut Pasteur, with Jacques Monod and François Jacob, during which he studied the regulation of the lac operon.  Edward Wise, a graduate of Park's lab, also joined the faculty at that time, but moved to Burroughs-Wellcome in 1972.  In 1967, Andrew Wright moved across the river from his postdoctoral position at MIT (with Phillips Robbins) to start a new lab studying the interactions of Salmonella phages with their host cells.

In 1968, the name of the department was changed to Molecular Biology and Microbiology to distinguish our emphasis on molecular genetic approaches to microbial physiology from more traditional ways of thinking about the subject.  At that time, molecular biology was still a new science that pertained almost exclusively to bacteria and viruses.

Park resigned as Chair in 1970, turning over the governance of the department to Elio Schaechter.  Two appointments in the next five years increased the faculty to a small, highly cohesive group of seven who interacted well with each other.  We have managed to maintain this spirit even as the department has doubled in size.  We have done so despite our stylistic differences by seeking consensus and working together for the common good.

The first new appointment was Abraham L. (Linc) Sonenshein, a graduate of Salvador Luria's lab at MIT and of Pierre Schaeffer's group at the Université de Paris.  Arriving in 1972, Sonenshein established a research group that focused on the regulation of spore formation in Bacillus subtilis.  Three years later, John M. Coffin, who trained with Howard Temin in Wisconsin and with the molecular virologist Charles Weissmann in Zurich, arrived to study the molecular genetics of retroviruses.  Mark Challberg came from The Johns Hopkins University in 1978 to initiate studies on adenovirus replication, but left in 1982 to take a full-time research position at the NIH.

In the 1960's and early 1970's, government support of basic research was at a high point, but, starting in the mid-1970's, harder times appeared.  This pressure, coupled with the desire to show the immediate relevance of research in response to ongoing social upheaval, induced many of our colleagues at other institutions to shift their efforts to mammalian cells.  Wholesale conversions of microbiology departments were not uncommon.  We held our ground, however, and were rewarded by the development of two areas of research that validated maintaining a strong presence in fundamental microbiology.  The revolution created by the introduction of recombinant DNA technology occurred almost simultaneously with the realization that the mysteries of bacterial pathogenesis could be unraveled using the basic tools of molecular microbiology.

Several department members began to take an active interest in microbial virulence mechanisms, realizing that their expertise in microbial genetics would serve them well in this field.  Thus, Malamy took on the anaerobic pathogen, Bacteroides fragilis, as a research system and Wright began to study Hemophilus influenzae and, later, Helicobacter pylori and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.  Sonenshein expanded his interest in spore-formers to include Clostridium perfringens and C. difficile.

We also began to recruit new faculty members interested in micro-organisms not previously represented.  In 1979, we enticed Michael Gill to move his lab from Harvard to Tufts, bringing to our department his interest in pathogenic mechanisms and his expertise working with bacterial toxins.  In 1990, we suffered a major blow, both personally and professionally, when Gill died of a sudden heart attack while playing tennis.  Ralph Isberg came from Stanley Falkow's lab at Stanford in 1985 to set up a group studying pathogenesis of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and Legionella pneumophila.  Carol Kumamoto, who was initially recruited by the Physiology Department, moved her research unit to our department, bringing with her projects involving protein secretion in Escherichia coli and differentiation in the pathogenic fungus, Candida albicans.  Kumamoto had previously studied secretion in bacteria with Jon Beckwith at Harvard Medical School and in eukaryotic cells with Robert Simoni at Stanford.  In 1986, Claire Moore was recruited from the MIT lab of Phil Sharp; she had invented the first system for studying mRNA 3' end processing in vitro and expanded that work to the Saccharomyces cerevisiae system. Dean Dawson, a yeast geneticist who had trained with Jack Szostack at Massachusetts General Hospital, arrived in 1988 and began to study the mechanism and regulation of meiotic recombination and chromosome segregation. Dawson moved to the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in 2006.

Stuart Levy, a physician who had trained in medicine and biochemical genetics at NIH and had held a secondary appointment in Molecular Biology and Microbiology since 1971, joined our department in 1990 as a full member, bringing together his research efforts in bacterial and human drug resistance, along with his Center for Adaptation Genetics and Drug Resistance.

When Elio Schaechter retired from the Chairmanship in 1993, after 23 years on the job, Linc Sonenshein served as Acting Chair while a national search was conducted to identify a new Chair.  The search committee's first choice, Catherine Squires, agreed to move from Columbia University to Tufts in 1994.  Squires is a well-known microbial geneticist and biochemist, who had trained at UC Davis with John Ingraham, at UC Santa Barbara with Nancy Lee, and at Stanford with Charles Yanofsky.  Her arrival signaled a new round of faculty hiring, leading in 1996 to the recruitment of Andrew Camilli and David Lazinski.  Camilli, a pathogenic microbiologist studying Vibrio cholerae and Streptococcus pneumoniae, was a student of Daniel Portnoy at the University of Pennsylvania and a postdoctoral fellow with John Mekalanos at Harvard Medical School.  Lazinski came from the Fox Chase Cancer Research Center, where he had begun a detailed investigation of the hepatitis delta virus with John Taylor.  Lazinski left the faculty in 2005. A third new faculty member, Joan Mecsas, opened her lab in November 1999, after completing postdoctoral training with Stanley Falkow at Stanford Medical School.  Mecsas is an expert on infection by Yersinia pseudotuberculosis and is especially interested in the pathway this bacterium takes as it makes its way through an animal’s immune and lymphatic systems. 

In 2003, Matthew Waldor, who had been a clinician-researcher in the Division of Geographic Medicine in the Department of Medicine, joined the department as an Associate Professor.  He expects to move to Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School early in 2007.   The most recent addition to the faculty was the recruitment of Ekaterina (Katya) Heldwein, who arrived in November 2006.  She is an expert structural biologist who trained at the Oregon Health Sciences University with Richard Brennan and at Harvard Medical School with Stephen Harrison.  Dr. Heldwein's specialty is protein structure determination with an emphasis on viral entry mechanisms. 

Cathy Squires retired from the Chair position in January 2007 to return to her roots in California. Linc Sonenshein is again Acting Chair while a national search is being conducted to find a permanent replacement.

Over the history of the Department, several excellent young scientists have directed small, independent laboratories as Research Assistant Professors.  These included Dana Boyd (now at Harvard Medical School) and Sonia Guterman (later a faculty member at Boston University and now a patent attorney).  Three scientists currently hold the title of Research Assistant Professor. Boris Belitsky studies many aspects of nitrogen metabolism and vitamin biosynthesis, Debrabata RayChaudhuri discovered that the cell division protein FtsZ is a GTPase and is looking for novel antibiotics that interfere with FtsZ activity, and Igor Rouzine creates mathematical models for infectious disease and viral drug resistance.

The Department launched a graduate program in Molecular Biology in 1965. The program, renamed Molecular Microbiology in 1994 to emphasize its orientation toward the use of bacteria, fungi and viruses as experimental systems, had granted 149 PhD degrees and 10 MS degrees as of December 2007.  Originally confined to labs within the Department of Molecular Biology and Microbiology, the graduate program became interdepartmental in the early 1980's.

The current census of the Graduate Program in Molecular Microbiology shows 15 faculty members and 39 PhD students.