Clemons to Deliver WALS on Antimicrobial Resistance 

Dr. William Clemons, Jr.

Dr. William M. (Bil) Clemons, Jr. will deliver the first of three NIH Director’s Lectures of this Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series (WALS) season, on Dec. 4 at 2 p.m., ET. His talk, “Mechanisms of Phage-Derived Protein Antibiotic” will be held in Bldg. 10, Lipsett Amphitheater.

Ever adaptable and evolving, pathogenic bacteria continue to outsmart and evade our most powerful antibiotic medicines at an alarming rate, leading to a global health crisis. At the 2024 United Nations General Assembly, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra stated that 39 million people could die from antibiotic resistance (AMR) in the next 25 years.

One way out of our AMR predicament could be by harnessing the power of bacteriophages, or phages for short, which are specialized viruses that seek out and kill bacteria. Locked in an evolutionary arms race with bacteria, phages have evolved different mechanisms for breaking through the bacterial cell wall and eliminating their host. The Clemons’ lab investigates those mechanisms and studies how they might be used in developing new antimicrobial therapeutics.

Clemons is the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, division of chemistry and chemical engineering. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah and then spent two years as a visiting scientist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. There, he was part of the team that solved the first atomic resolution structure of a small ribosomal subunit. This work led to a fundamental understanding of the translation of the genetic code and provided molecular details of the mechanism of a number of antibiotics.

Clemons then took a postdoctoral position at Harvard Medical School. Arriving at Caltech in 2006, the Clemons lab has continued its focus on structurally characterizing important biological systems.

To view the event online, see: at https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=55011. —Michael Tabasko