Henry Colecraft

Henry M. Colecraft is an American Biophysicist, the John C. Dalton Professor and Associate Vice Chair of the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Early life and education
Colecraft was born in Ghana. He moved to Boston as a child so his father could attend graduate school, and moved to England as a teenager, where he attended secondary school. was an undergraduate student in physiology at King's College London. He moved to the University of Rochester for his doctoral research, where he studied signal transduction mechanisms that impact muscarinic receptor mediated stimulation. He was a postdoc Johns Hopkins University, where he was recruited as an assistant professor. Here he established the Ion Channel Physiology & Disease Lab.

Research and career
Colecraft was appointed associate professor at Johns Hopkins University in 2007. He looks to understand the molecular mechanisms that underpin ion channel regulation. In particular, Colecraft has studied ubiquitin, a protein that regulates ion channels. He created a biophysical tool he calls "enDubs"; GFP and YFP-targeted deubiquitinases. These are deubiquitinases where the catalytic domain is fused to fluorophore-specific nanobodies. He is also interested how mutations in ion channels can cause disease in the cardiovascular, neurological and respiratory systems.