Update 02/02/2011: With the closing of Wright State University today due to inclement weather, the Varandani lecture scheduled for Wednesday, Feb. 2, has been canceled.
The 2011 Partab T. Varandani Memorial Lecture will be presented by Sir Paul Nurse, Ph.D. (left), Nobel Laureate and president of the Royal Society of London. The title of his lecture is “Controlling the Cell Cycle.” The lecture begins at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 2, in room 156 Student Union on the WSU main campus. It is free and open to the public.
The Varandani Lecture is sponsored by the Department of Biochemistry and molecular Biology in memory of the late Partab T. Varandani, Ph.D., who was professor and chief of the department’s endocrinology section until his death in 1987. For more information, contact the department at 937-775-3041.
Dr. Nurse is internationally known for his experiments on the molecular mechanisms regulating the mitotic division cycle in eukaryotic cells. In 2001, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Leland Hartwell and Timothy Hunt, for their discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin dependent kinases.
Dr. Nurse has served as Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Oxford, Director of Research at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute), and President of Rockefeller University in New York City. In 2010 Dr. Nurse became President of the Royal Society of London, a fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists, founded in 1660, and the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.
It was announced in July 2010 that Dr. Nurse will also become the first Director and Chief Executive of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation beginning in 2011. The UKCMRI will be Europe’s largest biomedical research facility with funding of nearly a billion dollars provided by a range of government and charitable organizations including the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and University College London. Around 1,250 biologists, clinical scientists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists will work alongside each other at the new facility. Key objectives to Dr. Nurse are to bridge the traditional barriers between different research teams and disciplines, and to improve the dialogue between scientists and the public. Read more (PDF).