The annual Gerard J. Barcak Memorial Lecture in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore will be given by Dr. Harry L. T. Mobley, Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine. Dr. Mobley is an expert in the mechanisms of bacterial pathogenesis and has studied virulence mechanisms of uropathogenic and Escherichia coli and Proteus mirabilis. He had until recently been a member of the faculty of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Dr. Mobley's talk is entitled "Bacterial metabolism and gene expression during infection should direct vaccine development". The lecture will be given at 4:00 PM on Monday, October 26, 2009 at the SMC Campus Center, Ballroom B (Room 210). The SMC Campus Center is at 621 W. Lombard Street in Baltimore.

The lecture honors the late Gerard Barcak, a PhD graduate of this department who studied with Dr. Rick Wolf and a long-time faculty member in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Dr. Barcak suffered an untimely death from prostate cancer in 2008.

An announcement of the poster assignments for the 12th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biochemical Sciences has been posted on the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry site. A PDF identifying each student poster presentation is also available.

The UMBC Biotech Forum 2009 is an event that will allow professionals from a variety of fields to connect with each other by providing a forum for networking and dialogue. During the event, Mr. Jim Greenwood, President and CEO of BIO (Biotechnology Industry Organization) will speak on "Healing, feeding and fueling the world through biotechnology". BIO represents over 1200 biotechnology companies, universities and state biotechnology centers in the US and in 30 other countries. Mr. Greenwood is a former US Representative from Pennsylvanias 8th District. The event will be held in the UC Ballroom on the third floor of the University Center on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 from 6 to 8:30 PM. The event is sponsored by UMBC Program in Continuing & Professional Studies and the UMBC Biotechnology Graduate Programs. To register for the event, go to the event web site at http://umbc.ennect.com/events/biotech

Dr. Dietmar Zinner of the German Primate Center in Göttingen has invited 30 speakers from around the world, most of whom focus on hybridization between primate species, as well as speakers talking about hybridization in other groups (birds, butterflies, ungulates). Travel expenses for the conference speakers as well as expenses for the symposium itself are being paid for through a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation.

Lanyn Perez, a graduate student in the laboratory of Dr. Richard E. Wolf, Jr. presented a talk at the Global Regulation session of  the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) meeting on Mechanisms and Regulation of Prokaryotic Transcription, which met June 21-26 in Saxon River, VT. The title of her talk was "Regulating the Activity of Rob, an E. coli Transcriptional Activator, by Sequestration-Dispersal". Ms. Perez was one of a small number of students and postdoctoral researchers who had submitted an abstract for a poster presentation who were chosen instead to present their work as an oral presentation.

The 12th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciences will be held in the Engineering & Computer Science (ECS) Building on Saturday, October 10, 2009, beginning at 9:30 AM.

This symposium will involve undergraduates doing research at Universities across the Mid-Atlantic region. The event normally attracts over 400 students and faculty mentors and comprises nearly 200 poster contributions covering a diversity of topics in Chemistry, Biology and Biochemistry.

During this one-day symposium, students will present their research in poster form. Faculty are encouraged to volunteer to judge these student posters. Abstracts are due by September 20, 2009. For more information, please visit the symposium web site: http://www.umbc.edu/UGSymp/

On Saturday, April 25, 2009, UMBC’s Departments of Biological Sciences and Chemistry and Biochemistry sponsored the Share Our Success Conference at UMBC South Campus..  This event, the culmination of a year-long project, brought together three groups (TQB, TQC, and SMART Teams) made up of high school teachers, high school students, researchers, educators and/or scientists.  TQB (Teacher Quality in Biology) and TQC (Teacher Quality in Chemistry) are grant funded professional development programs designed to update teacher content knowledge in the two scientific disciplines.  SMART teams (Students Modeling A Research Topic) are a collaboration between high school students, a trained HS teacher, and a UMBC researcher who work together to design a 3D model of a protein.

The event also had two keynote speakers, Dr. Eric Martz, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Dr. Katherine Seley-Radke, UMBC Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.  Two of the SMART Teams additionally gave performances based on their scientific projects.  Winston Churchill High School SMART team wrote and sang “Don’t Stop Dispersing” (a parody on “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey), which describes the functions by an unusual “off-on” switch, “sequestration-dispersal,” on the Rob protein.  The Patterson High School SMART Team presented a skit that highlighted the problems of antibiotic resistance, a key part of their molecule story that centers around a ribosome.

Dr. Kevin Griffith will begin in the Fall as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Griffith received his PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology in 2002, working in the laboratory of Dr. Richard E. Wolf, Jr. Previously, he had graduated with an MS from the Applied Molecular Biology Program. Since leaving UMBC, Dr. Griffith has been a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Alan Grossman in the Department of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Griffith is the author of 12 peer-reviewed publications, 10 deriving from his work with Dr. Wolf on the mechanism of activation of transcription by members of the SoxS-family of transcription activation proteins. Among other things, he provided critical support for a novel form of transcriptional activation termed pre-recruitment. With Dr. Grossman he has studied the mechanism of ComA-dependent quorum sensing in Bacillus subtilis and inducible protein degradation by the ClpXP protease.

The 25th Annual Annual Graduate Association of Biology (GABS) Symposium wlll be held March 12, 2009 in the UMBC University Center Ballroom.   Everyone (presenters and attendees), please register online

Minu K Srivastava, a PhD candidate in the Program in Biological Sciences has been gave a short talk entitled "Myeloid-derived Suppressor Cells Inhibit T Cell Activation by Depleting Cystine and Cysteine" at the annual Tumor Immunology Meeting "Tumor Immunology: New Perspectives" sponsored by the  American Association of Cancer Research held in Miami from Dec 2-5, 2008. She was also awarded a AACR-AFLAC Scholar-in-Training Travel Award to attend this meeting. Ms. Srivastava is pursuing her PhD studies with Dr. Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg.

Dr. Henry V. Baker, a PhD graduate of the department who studied with Dr. Richard E. Wolf, Jr., has been named Chair of the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Florida College of Medicine. Dr. Baker has been a faculty member in the department since 1987, Associate Department Chair from 1995 to 2003 and Interim Chair since 2003. His University credits him helping his department achieve national recognition; the department is ranked 8th nationally among medical school genetics departments and 18th overall, achieving that distinction during his tenure as Interim Chair.

On November 5th,  Dr. Rick Wolf, Program Director for Biotechnology graduate programs, along with UMBC Continuing and Professional Studies will host a Biotech Forum titled “From Bench to Business: Biotech Career Opportunities”.

The forum will be from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at the UMBC Tech Incubator, South Campus. During the forum, industry experts will lead a discussion on how to start or advance a biotech career, career options beyond the bench, types of jobs in demand and how to prepare for these new jobs.

To learn more: www.umbc.edu/biotech

Dr. Jeff Peters who completed his PhD in the Omland lab in May 2006 was recently hired as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Wright State University in Dayton, OH.  In addition, Dr. Peters also just received a $334,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Michelle Starz-Gaiano, the newest addition to our faculty, has recently arrived in the department. Dr. Starz-Gaiano has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine working with Dr. Denise Montell in the Department of Biological Chemistry. Her work there concerned molecular mechanisms of cell migration using the border cells of the Drosophila ovary as a model system. Her research focused in particular on steroid hormone signaling and transcription factor regulation. Dr. Starz-Gaiano received her PhD degree working with Dr. Ruth Lehmann, Julius Raynes Professor of Developmental Genetics in the Department of Cell Biology in the Skirball Institute at New York University Medical Center. Her research with Dr. Lehmann also focused on molecular clues and intracellular signaling in Drosophila.

A list of Dr. Starz-Gaiano's publications is available on Pubmed.

The First Annual Gerard J. Barcak Memorial Lecture will be presented by Dr. Hamilton O. Smith, Nobel laureate, former Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and present Group Leader in Synthetic Biology and Bioenergy at the J. Craig Venter Institute. His lecture, entitled "The quest for a minimal cell" will be presented on Monday, September 8, 2008, at 4:00 PM in Taylor Lecture Hall on the campus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The lecture hall is located on the first floor of the Bressler Research Building at 655 W. Baltimore Street in Baltimore.

The lecture honors Dr. Gerry Barcak, a PhD graduate of this department who studied with Dr. Rick Wolf. He was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Smith before going to the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Dr. Barcak suffered an untimely death from prostate cancer earlier this year.

Directions for parking and an interactive map of the UMB campus are available online.

Olesya Chornoguz, a PhD student in the Ostrand-Rosenberg lab was invited to give a short talk to the Annual American Association of Cancer Research meeting held in San Diego, California, April 11-16, 2008.   Ms. Chornoguz was also awarded a travel grant to attend the meeting.

Work in the laboratory of Dr. Suzanne Ostrand-Rosenberg, Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Chair of Biochemistry, was profiled in a recent issue of Science magazine. The article discussed the increased numbers of myeloid derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) in cancer patients and the fact that they interfere with immunotherapy as a cancer treatment. In a series of recent papers, Dr. Rosenberg's laboratory has detailed how inflammation stimulates production of MDSCs and that the cells themselves promote inflammation.

The profiled research was a collaboration between Dr. Rosenberg, Dr. Pratima Sinha (Asst. Research Scientist), Dr. Stephanie Bunt (recent PhD graduate in Biological Sciences), Ms. Virginia Clements (technician) and Dr. Jeff Leips (Associate Professor) among others.

Profile: Marx J. Cancer immunology. Cancer's bulwark against immune attack: MDS cells. Science. 2008 319:154-156 [PDF]

Lab publications cited:
Bunt SK, Yang L, Sinha P, Clements VK, Leips J, Ostrand-Rosenberg S. Reduced inflammation in the tumor microenvironment delays the accumulation of myeloid-derived suppressor cells and limits tumor progression. Cancer Res. 2007 67:10019-10026 [PDF]
Sinha P, Clements VK, Bunt SK, Albelda SM, Ostrand-Rosenberg S. Cross-talk between myeloid-derived suppressor cells and macrophages subverts tumor immunity toward a type 2 response. J Immunol. 2007 179:977-983 [PDF]