The University of Wisconsin–Madison student chapter of the American Association for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) invites undergraduate researchers to participate in the Molecules in the Midwest conference on Saturday, March 7.
The conference, which will be held at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on the UW–Madison campus, will feature a poster competition, guest speakers from leading graduate programs in the biological and chemical sciences, and networking opportunities with graduate students and faculty members.
To continue to improve the student experience, the Departments of Biochemistry and Bacteriology are combining their undergraduate advising services to form the Biochemistry and Microbiology Advising Hub. With support from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), the hub will have a team of four advisors in a new space.
The hub will provide biochemistry and microbiology majors with expanded advising support, including shorter wait times, more flexible drop-in hours, and overall increased access to an academic advisor. It will also build a professional community among the...
Graduate students attend multiple conferences during their educational careers. But after his first successful trip to the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) conference, Joseph Kim decided to get more involved and was recently named Communications Chair for MSA’s Student Council.
Kim, a physical chemistry graduate student in the lab of biochemistry professor Elizabeth Wright, is focused on using cryo-electron microscopy technology to get detailed images of neurons. By perturbing them to a neurodegenerative state, he will be able to gain insights into what changes occur during...
Update: See the videos of these seminars here.
Patrick Cramer of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry will give the prestigious UW–Madison 2020 Hilldale Lecture in Biological Sciences in late January. All members of the campus community and public are invited to attend the lecture on eukaryotic gene expression and transcription at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23 in the Ebling Symposium Center, Microbial Sciences Building (1550 Linden Drive).
Claire Evensen, the daughter of a physician and an engineering physics professor, says she sometimes feels like her college major was predestined.
“From a young age, my parents instilled in me this attitude that science is cool,” she says.
As an undergraduate at UW–Madison, Evensen has excelled in biochemistry and mathematics, winning numerous honors for her academic work and original research. Her latest award is the most prestigious yet: a Marshall Scholarship.
Biochemistry is the foundation of what Kevin Sokolowski does every day in his career. Armed with an undergraduate degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as an M.D., he has embarked on a unique alternative career as a Senior Medical Science Liaison for Solid Tumor Oncology Development at AbbVie.
Sokolowski came to UW–Madison in 2000, after a year at UW–La Crosse, and graduated in 2003 before heading to medical school. He says he was drawn to Madison because of the university’s history and strength in biochemistry.
For people that suffer from rare mitochondrial diseases, there aren’t many places to turn. The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation (UMDF) is one organization providing resources that allow them to find community — and also connect with scientists, such as those who study proteins and cellular processes that relate to their disease in the lab of biochemistry professor and Morgridge Institute for Research investigator Dave Pagliarini.
University of Wisconsin–Madison Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Nutritional Sciences and Ph.D. alumnus William G. “Bill” Hoekstra died on Monday, Nov. 4, 2019 at 91. For nearly four decades, he was a faculty member with expertise in the role of trace minerals in human and animal nutrition. He made seminal contributions to both departments and helped found the Department of Nutritional Sciences during his time in the UW–Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
Hoekstra was born in Colorado and obtained a bachelor’s degree at Colorado State University. He then headed...
Update: See the videos of these seminars here.
Holly Ingraham of the University of California, San Francisco will give the 2019 UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry Steenbock Lectures in early December. All members of the campus community are invited to attend these lectures and learn from this pioneer in understanding multiple areas of endocrine signaling.
Ingraham is known for both her research and being a leader of diversity in STEM initiatives. She investigates how multiple organs communicate energy demand and energy expenditure by regulating hunger, nutrient absorption...
Cell culture media, the cocktail of chemicals and nutrients that keep cells alive and thriving in a dish, have been an essential tool of biology for more than 70 years. Remarkably, the composition of these potions hasn’t fundamentally changed much over that time, primarily because they deliver what scientists need: Cells that stay viable and rapidly divide.
But Jason Cantor is thinking about cell culture media from another angle: Can we make it more human?
Andrew Buller, professor of chemistry at UW-Madison and affiliate of the Department of Biochemistry, is working to develop methods to create new protein building blocks in living systems. This chemical research, recently recognized with a $2.2 million grant from NIH, could make these processes more affordable for and accessible to scientists with expertise in other backgrounds.
Buller will receive a 2019 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award from the High-Risk, High-Reward program for his project, titled Engineering In Vivo Biomolecular Synthesis with...
Forward-thinking science and childhood memories came full circle on Wednesday for U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who visited a lab at the Morgridge Institute for Research that is carrying on the inspired legacy of her grandfather, David E. Green.
Baldwin, who was raised by her grandparents in Madison, spent many days visiting her grandfather’s lab just a few blocks away from the Morgridge Institute, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Enzyme Institute. Green was recruited from Columbia University in 1948 to be the original director of the Enzyme Institute and he led the program through...
It’s been a long and winding road in the lab of Emeritus Professor Hector F. DeLuca when it comes to the effects of vitamin D and ultraviolet (UV) light on the disease multiple sclerosis (MS), a debilitating neurological disease with no known cure. Years of research in mice have led them to the understanding that it’s not vitamin D that offers protection from the disease but rather a slice of the ultraviolet spectrum helping in some mysterious way.
One place to begin the story is with a finding from a scientist named D. Goldberg. In the 1970s he observed that there was an inverse...
Woonghee Lee in the lab of biochemistry professor John Markley plans to improve data analysis for the burgeoning technique of solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation.
NMR studies require sophisticated instrumentation, such as that located in the National Magnetic Resonance Facility at Madison (NMRFAM) housed in the UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry. But gathering data on the instruments is only half the challenge. Data must be analyzed to transform the data read out to something researchers can interpret...
Researchers in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry and Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) will utilize a $2.1 million grant from the United States Department of Energy to elucidate the properties of a potentially useful and understudied class of genes and enzymes in important bioenergy crops, such as poplar, sorghum, and switchgrass. The project is led by professors Brian Fox and John Ralph.
The two kinds of enzymes — called acyl-CoA ligases and BAHD acyltransferases — together create a large variety of potentially useful molecules. In a...
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