The Department of Biochemistry is pleased to announce its 2019 undergraduate and graduate student departmental awards and fellowships. These awards and fellowships celebrate talented students in the department and are made possible by generous gifts to the department to fund graduate and undergraduate research.
“It’s always a pleasure to honor so many brilliant young people in this ceremony every year,” said department chair Brian Fox at the awards reception on Friday, April 26. “These awards highlight the hard work of these students, mentorship of their faculty advisors, and ...
Two University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers have been awarded more than $1 million as part of the multidisciplinary university research initiative from the United States Army Research Office to better understand microbial communities. Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, and Ophelia Venturelli, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry, are co-investigators on the project, which involves more than $6 million and seven faculty members at universities across the United States.
Their project is titled “Investigating energy efficiency,...
Jennifer Loeb always knew she wanted to work on the research and development of drugs to treat diseases. Her interests brought her to the University of Wisconsin–Madison to study biochemistry and launched an exciting career that has spanned undergraduate research, lab management, product development in Colorado — and now a job connecting scientists around the world with resources and products at the life sciences company Promega in Madison, Wisc.
The Wisconsin native grew up outside of Milwaukee and says coming to UW–Madison to study biochemistry was an easy choice. Loeb graduated...
Update: See the videos of these seminars here.
Hans Clevers of Utrecht University will deliver the 2019 UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry International Steenbock Lectures on May 20 and 21.
Clevers is a world leader in the field of adult stem cell biology. The signatures of his award-winning research have been defining the role of Wnt signaling in stem cell control and cancer, and launching the use of “organoids” to analyze stem cells in their 3D context within a tissue. Clever won one of the inaugural Breakthrough Prizes in the Life Sciences in 2013, and has also...
Students all learn differently, especially when it comes to sciences like biochemistry. Some are visual learners, others auditory. Sometimes things click better after a demonstration. It can be helpful for others to be able to listen or watch something multiple times rather than having to absorb it in just one lecture.
Online education can help instructors provide these additional learning opportunities and Lynne Prost, a faculty associate in the Department of Biochemistry, used a university professional development grant to expand her expertise in this area. Thanks to the 2018...
For Pennsylvania State University professor Squire Booker, scientific inspiration comes from elucidating the “new chemical language” behind novel biochemical reactions. It’s inspiration he picked up during this time as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Biochemistry working with now-Emeritus Professor Perry Frey in the 1990s.
Booker, a Texas native, attended Austin College and went on to graduate studies at MIT and an NSF/NATO fellowship to study in Paris before writing a letter to Frey to request to join his lab as a postdoc.
Scientists in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry are watching evolution happen in real time.
In a study published online this month in the Journal of Bacteriology, biochemistry professor Michael Cox and his team describe blasting E. coli bacteria with ionizing radiation once a week, causing the bacteria to become radiation resistant. In doing so, they have uncovered genetic mutations and mechanisms underlying this resistance.
The findings reveal ways to possibly engineer radiation-resistant bacteria to use for various applications in the future,...
Assistant professor of biochemistry Ophelia Venturelli was recently named to a list of 34 young researchers featured in the journal Biochemistry’s “Future of Biochemistry: The International Issue” special issue.
“I am excited to be included in this list of outstanding new investigators,” says Venturelli, who is also an affiliate of the Department of Bacteriology, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. “The research areas are quite diverse and illustrate the breadth of cutting-edge research in Biochemistry.”
Huda Zoghbi of the Baylor College of Medicine will give the 2019 UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry Steenbock Lectures in early March. All members of the campus community are invited to attend these lectures and learn from this pioneer in understanding the molecular basis of human neurological disorders.
For Danielle Lohman, her passion for science policy began when she heard a Ph.D. chemist speak at a career conference about the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) fellowship at the State Department in Washington, D.C.
Lohman, recently a postdoctoral fellow in Dave Pagliarini’s Department of Biochemistry lab at the Morgridge Institute for Research, was in her second year of graduate school as part of the Integrated Program in Biochemistry (IPiB) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison at the time. IPiB is the joint graduate program of the Department of...
In high school, Judith Simcox pored over scientific literature to try to understand the link between her sister’s Down Syndrome and type 1 diabetes. It was the first time she asked a question that didn’t have an answer yet — and it led her down the path of answering unknown questions as a metabolism researcher and advocate for diversity in science.
Simcox, whose work specifically focuses on how organs communicate through lipid signaling to respond to the energy demands of cold exposure, has joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry as its newest assistant...
Biochemistry postdoctoral scholar Kate Henderson has received the 2019 Paul Boyer Award for Postdoctoral Excellence in Biochemistry. The award recognizes a postdoc in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry for his or her excellence in research. The postdoc also gives a lecture as part of the Boyer Lecture Series. The lecture is at 3 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 25 in Room 1211 of the Hector F. DeLuca Biochemical Sciences Building.
In the laboratory of biochemistry professor Tom Record, she combines superior research with a dedication to mentoring undergraduate...
A major goal of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center is to harness the power of microbes to create biofuels. But often, it’s an expensive challenge for scientists to identify the most useful individual variants among thousands of similar microbe strains. A new study led by Vatsan Raman, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, unveils a biosensor that may light the way to the best microbial candidates for biofuel production.
In search of the best biofuel-producing microbes, scientists may need to make millions of variants via genetic...
The National Magnetic Resonance Facility at Madison (NMRFAM) housed in the UW–Madison Department of Biochemistry is home to state-of-the-art technology for biomolecular nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and related techniques. The facility’s equipment requires helium, and with worldwide supplies dwindling, has recently installed a helium recovery system to increase sustainability and cut costs.
If you’ve ever grown carrots in your garden and puzzled over never once seeing them flower, don’t blame a missing green thumb.
Carrots, beets and many other plants won’t flower until they’ve gone through winter. The extended cold gives them the signal to flower quickly once spring arrives, providing the plants an edge in the race to produce seeds.
But cold isn’t always required. In the 1930s, two English scientists discovered that some crops in the grass family, like rye or wheat, can use short days instead of cold to tell them when winter has come.
“But nothing was...
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