Dr. Naider received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University in 1966 and his Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry under Professor Murray Goodman in 2001. After a two year Postdoctoral stint with Ephraim Katchalsky (Katzir) at the Weizamnn Institute of Science he began his academic career at the City University of New York ( Richmond College ) in 1973 as an assistant professor of chemistry. Currently Dr. Naider is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. He also is the present holder of the Leonard and Esther Kurtz Term Professorship at the College of Staten Island .
Dr. Naider's research interests revolve around peptides and involve their chemistry, structure and biology. He has worked in the area of peptide transport across biological membranes and together with his long time collaborator Professor Jeffrey M. Becker at the University of Tennessee characterized and cloned the di/tripeptide transporter from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This work led to the discovery of a family of such proteins that they named the PTR family (Peptide Transport Family). These transporters are ubiquitous in living cells and have significance in the absorption of many antibiotics in the human intestine.
Using S. cerevisiae as a model Naider and Becker have also studied signal transduction via G protein-coupled receptors. The goal of this work is to understand at the molecular level the structure and function of this important class of membrane receptors. Naider's laboratory has expertise in the synthesis, purification and conformational analysis of peptides containing from 5 to as many as 100 amino acid residues. Peptides are prepared using both synthetic and biosynthetic approaches and characterized by a variety of techniques including infra-red spectroscopy, circular dichroism and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. His research program has had continuous NIH support for 30 years.
Presently, Naider is a councilor of the American Peptide Society, the Chair of the Beakthroughs in BioScience Subcommittee of FASEB, on the Board of the Research Foundation of the City University of New York and a permanent member of the Bioorganic and Natural Products Study Section of the National Institutes of Health Naider has been married to his wife Anita for 36 years and is the father of four children.
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