Newest NAS Members Speak, June 8
Drs. Ronald Germain and Eugene Koonin will deliver lectures at a mini-symposium that will be held to celebrate their recent election to the National Academy of Sciences. This event will be held on Wednesday, June 8 from 10 a.m. to noon in Masur Auditorium, Bldg. 10. All are welcome to attend to hear about the exciting research going on in their labs. The two join the more than 40 active NIH scientists in the academy.
Germain is an NIH distinguished investigator in NIAID’s lymphocyte biology section. He studies the basic aspects of innate and adaptive immune function, with an emphasis on the biochemical mechanisms involved in the discrimination between self and foreign peptide-associated major histocompatibility complex molecules by T-cells as well as on T-cell antigen-presenting cell interactions and the subsequent delivery of effector function. Germain’s talk is titled “Developing a deep understanding of the immune system, with an emphasis on ‘system.’”
Koonin is a senior investigator in the evolutionary genomics research group, National Library of Medicine/National Center for Biotechnology Information. He performs research in many areas of evolutionary genomics and takes advantage of the advances in comparative genomics and systems biology to address fundamental problems in evolutionary biology. He hypothesized in 2005 that “spacer DNA” in the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) loci of bacteria and Archaea, which matched sequences of bacteriophages, could be a key part of a sort of adaptive immune system. Koonin’s talk is titled “Adventures in evolutionary genomics: from comparison of the first bacterial genomes to a new generation of genome engineering tools.”
For more information and reasonable accommodation, contact Jacqueline Roberts, (301) 594-6747 or robertsjm@od.nih.gov.