1) BCMP is sad to announce the passing of one of our distinguished
Emeritus Professors and former department head, DR. ELKAN BLOUT.
Elkan R. Blout, PhD, the Edward S. Harkness professor emeritus of
biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical
School, died on Dec. 20, 2006, at age 87. Dr. Blout received his AB
from Princeton University in 1939 and his PhD from Columbia University
in 1942. He became a professor at HMS in 1962, investigating the
chemistry and biochemistry of proteins and enzymes, and served as chair
of the Department of Biological Chemistry from 1965-1969. His many
honors and awards over the years included honorary degrees from Harvard
University in 1962 and Loyola University in 1976 as well as the
National Medal of Science in 1990 for his groundbreaking work in
chemistry identifying the complex structure of proteins, crucial to
understanding their function. Dr. Blout is survived by his wife, Gail,
and his children, James, Susan Merry Lausch, William, and Darya.
NOTICES:
2) The dissertation defense seminar of MARC ADAM SCHWABISH, “Asf1
and Swi/Snf Function in RNA Polymerase II Elongation and Histone
Dynamics”, will be held Friday, Feb 16, at 1:00pm in TMEC Room 250.
WELCOME:
3) CHRISTOPHER NEUMANN (Walsh lab)
4) FEI CHEN (Rando lab)
5) LUIS SOARES (Buratowski lab) obtained a B.Sc. degree in
Microbiology and Genetics from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He
later joined the Gulbenkian PhD. Program in Biomedicine and did his
Ph.D. work in Biomedicine in Juan Valcarcel’s lab first at the EMBL,
Germany, and later in the CRG in Barcelona, Spain, working in splice
site definition (Thesis title: Role of DEK in 3’ splice site
recognition by U2AF). He recently joined Dr. Buratowski’s lab working
on the interaction between splicing and transcription.
6) JOSEPH LOPARO (van Oijen lab) obtained a B.S. degree with
honors in chemistry from Case Western Reserve University. He obtained
his Ph. D. in chemistry from M.I.T. where he worked with Andrei
Tokmakoff. Joe's thesis work focused on using ultrafast nonlinear
infrared spectroscopy to observe the structural dynamics of water's
hydrogen bonding network. His work in the van Oijen lab will be geared
at developing novel single molecule techniques to observe the
conformational dynamics of the T7 replisome during DNA replication.