Roger Tsien
Roger Y. Tsien, PhD, a professor of pharmacology and of chemistry and biochemistry at UC San Diego and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will present the Gladstone Institutes' 2006 Distinguished Lecture on Monday, May 8.
His talk, "Building Molecules to Spy on Cells and Tumors," will take place at 4 p.m. on in the Mahley Auditorium at the Gladstone building at Mission Bay, 1650 Owens St. Convenient parking is available directly across the street from the building.
Tsien's research focuses on the interfaces between organic chemistry, cell biology, and neurobiology. He is best known for designing and building molecules that either report or perturb signal transduction inside living cells. These molecules, created by organic synthesis or by the engineering of naturally fluorescent proteins, have enabled many laboratories, including his own, to gain new insights into signaling via calcium, sodium, pH, cyclic nucleotides, nitric oxide, inositol polyphosphates, membrane potential changes, protein phosphorylation, active export of proteins from the nucleus, and gene transcription.
His current research focuses on understanding how the spatial and temporal dynamics of signal transduction orchestrate complex cellular responses, such as gene expression and synaptic plasticity.
Tsien received an undergraduate degree in chemistry and physics from Harvard and a doctorate in physiology from the University of Cambridge. Before moving to UCSD, he was on the faculty of UC Berkeley. His many awards include the Anfinsen Award of the Protein Society, the Max Delbruck Medal, the Heineken Prize in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Davson Lectureship of the American Physiological Society, the Alexander Todd Visiting Professorship of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, the Keith Porter Lectureship of the American Society for Cell Biology, and the Wolf Prize in Medicine (shared with Robert Weinberg). He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1995 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1998.
For more details, contact
Denise Murray McPherson, 415/734-2505.
Source: John Watson
