The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Stephen C. Harrison, Ph.D., Giovanni Armenise-Harvard Professor of Basic Medical Sciences, professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology, professor of pediatrics, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics, Harvard Medical School; head of the Laboratory of Molecular Medicine at Children's Hospital, Boston; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Enveloped viruses, those with lipid-bilayer membranes, enter cells by membrane fusion. Non-enveloped viruses perforate the membrane of an entry vesicle. Both processes can be followed by single-particle observations, in cells or on supported bilayers in vitro, and their molecular mechanisms can be studied by referring to known structures of the viral surface proteins. Dr. Harrison will describe research on molecular events in membrane fusion during entry of the influenza and West Nile viruses, and on membrane perforation during entry of rotaviruses.

 

Dr. Harrison, the initiator of high-resolution virus crystallography, has made important contributions to structural biology, most notably by determining and analyzing the structures of viruses and viral proteins, and also by crystallographic analysis of protein/DNA complexes, and by structural studies of protein-kinase switching mechanisms. Dr. Harrison obtained his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard has served on its faculty since 1971. Between 1972 and 1996, he was chair of the board of tutors in biochemical sciences, Harvard’s undergraduate program in biochemistry; he was chair of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology from 1988 to 1992. For many years, his research laboratory was linked closely with that of the late Don C. Wiley.

 

Dr. Harrison is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of EMBO and of the Royal Society. He has received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the ICN International Prize in Virology, the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Distinguished Achievement Award in Infectious Disease Research, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Gregori Aminoff Prize in Crystallography and the UCSD/Merck Life Sciences Achievement Award.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Alena Powell

Phone

(212) 327-7745

Sponsor

Alena Powell
(212) 327-7745
apowell@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3623