Alan Grossman  Alan D. Grossman, is an American microbiologist who is currently the head of the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2014, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Initially, his research was focused on characterization of bacterial chromosome segregation. His group was among the first that identified the Spo0J protein, the homologue of ParB, responsible for the process of chromosome segregation in B. subtilis. He later moved on to show that Spo0J binds to specific cis-sites on the DNA in order to implement its function and identified the sequences of those cis-sites which was termed "ParS".