Sam is a Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology at UC San Diego and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Sam Reck-Peterson received her B.A. in Biology at Carleton College, her Ph.D. in Cell Biology at Yale University working with Drs. Mark Mooseker and Peter Novick, and did postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco with Dr. Ron Vale. She joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 2007, where she was an Assistant and then Associate professor of Cell Biology. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2015. Dr. Reck-Peterson was the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award (2008), a Rita Allen and Milton Cassel Scholar award (2009), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Simons Faculty Scholar Award (2016). She became an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2018. In addition to HHMI, her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s. She received the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) WICB Junior Award for Excellence in Research in 2013 and was named an ASCB Fellow in 2023. She is currently a Trustee on the UC San Diego Foundation Board.

Dr. Reck-Peterson is a mechanistic cell biologist. Her research focuses on the molecular basis of intracellular transport along microtubules. Her work has revealed how the microtubule-based molecular motor “dynein” works and is regulated. She also studies how defects in intracellular transport are linked to disease. Her team is investigating the links between Parkinson’s Disease and microtubule-based transport, as well as how viruses subvert the dynein machinery to escape immune responses. Dr. Reck-Peterson served as a council member for the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) from 2014 to 2017, was the Chair of the 2018 Gordon Research Conference on Cytoskeletal Motors, and the Program Chair for the 2018 ASCB|European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) joint annual meeting. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cell Biology and Annual Reviews in Cell and Developmental Biology.

Dr. Reck-Peterson is passionate about making cutting-edge technology available to her local scientific community. She was involved in establishing the Nikon Imaging Center at UC San Diego in 2018 and serves as its Faculty Director. She was also involved in establishing the Goeddel Family Technology Sandbox in 2022 and served as its co-Director until 2023. Together, these centers bring advanced light microscopy, cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography, mass spectrometry and flow cytometry resources to the UC San Diego community.

Dr. Reck-Peterson is also passionate about training and mentoring the next generation of scientists. She was the Associate Director of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program at Harvard Medical School from 2011 to 2014. She received the “Young Mentor Award” from Harvard Medical School in 2012. She reviews grants for the HHMI Hannah Gray and Freeman Hrabowski Programs, and is on the Board of Scientific Advisors for the Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship.