Thomas Spratt

Thomas Spratt is a Professor in the Department of Molecular and Precision Medicine at Pennsylvania State University. He holds affiliations with the Penn State Cancer Institute (Mechanisms of Carcinogenesis) and the Penn State Center for Research on Tobacco and Health. His research focuses on DNA damage/repair mechanisms, tobacco carcinogenesis, and translesion synthesis. He has led multiple NIH-funded grants, including studies on electronic cigarette toxicity and lung cancer susceptibility.

Education: PhD in Chemistry from the University of Chicago (1985).

Research interests combine organic synthesis, protein engineering, and next-generation sequencing to study DNA repair pathways. His lab has identified key repair mechanisms for tobacco-derived DNA adducts and pioneered chemical biology tools to probe polymerase activity.

Recent projects include:

• "Translational Studies on Temperature and Solvent Effects on Electronic Cigarette-Derived Oxidants" (NIH, 2023–2025)
• "Penn State TCORS: Tobacco Product Composition Effects on Toxicity and Addiction" (NIH, 2023–2025)

Labs/Teams: Spratt Lab, focused on chemical biology approaches to understand DNA repair and mutagenesis.