David Sanders (biologist)

David Sanders was an associate professor of biological sciences at Purdue University. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and then attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Yale College in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. He conducted his Ph.D. research in Biochemistry with Daniel E. Koshland, Jr., who was then editor of the journal Science, at the University of California at Berkeley. Sanders demonstrated that the response regulators in the two-component regulatory systems were phosphorylated on an aspartate residue and that they were protein phosphatases with a covalent intermediate. In 1995, he joined the Markey Center for Structural Biology at Purdue University. In 2016, Sanders was elected to the West Lafayette City Council. He has opposed the plan to divert hundreds of millions of gallons of water from Tippecanoe County aquifers to the LEAP project in Boone County, and he sponsored the West Lafayette City Council resolution opposing the pipeline.