Dr. Joseph Beckman and graduate student Jared Williams were featured in a news article and video on KEZI news for research on Lou Gehrig’s disease and new possibilities for treatment.

“In this disease, the motor neurons start to die – one after another until you cannot move a single muscle in your body”

“I have a compound that looks promising,” Beckman said. “There are a lot of people dying a horrible death, and they’re desperate to try it. And the ethics of this are very complex. And what I do not want to do is to give a drug that is going to make them sicker or die more rapidly. And we have to be very, very careful in how we test this and think of all the possibilities and all the things that might go wrong.”

Video: KEZI News – Lou Gehrig’s Research

Read the full article here.

Lanelle’s research in Michael Freitag’s lab is detailed in the Spring 2014 issue of Terra. Read more here.

“Considered a leader in both reproductive biology and stem cell research, Ann Kiessling earned her doctorate from Oregon State University in biochemistry and biophysics in 1971. Now, she is founder, director and researcher at the Bedford Stem Cell Research Foundation in Bedford, Mass.

Kiessling’s interest in reproductive biology led to the creation of the first laboratory for in vitro human fertilization in Oregon in the early 1980s.” Read more about Dr. Ann Kiesling here.

Watch the seminar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBNsyKlBpg0

BB students did superbly in last night’s University Awards.  I don’t believe any other major had more award recipients than BB. (Kevin Ahern)

Robert MacVicar Exceptional Service Award – Deepthi Ennamuri
Kate Jameson Award – Omar Rachdi
Grace Wu Memorial – Lubna Khan
Benjamin A Gilman Intl. Scholarship – Julia Jones
Waldo Cummings Honorable Mention (Junior) – Jacob Huegel
Waldo Cummings Senior – Deepthi Ennamuri, Oresta Tolmach, Justin Zhang
Barry Goldwater Honorable Mention – Emily Cade
Fulbright Scholarship Finalist – Annika Swanson
Drucilla Shepard (Sophomore) – Jordyn Clarke
Drucilla Shepard (Junior) – Natasha Smith
Drucilla Shepard (Junior) – Arianna Kahler-Quesada
Drucilla Shepard (Junior) – Tanner Grenz
Drucilla Shepard (Junior) – Brian Josephson
Presidential Scholar (graduating) – Oresta Tolmach
Drucilla Shepard (Junior) – Brian Josephson
Women of Achievement – Deepthi Ennamuri and Lubna Khan

Emily Cade of Julie Greenwood’s lab was recently recognized with an hononorable mention in the Goldwater Scholarship competition.  This year OSU had two students who received honorable mention.  This included Emily Cade from the Biochemistry and Biophysics department and Johnathon Van Why from the Mathematics department. 

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry Goldwater, who served his country for 56 years as a soldier and statesman, including 30 years of service in the U.S. Senate.

The purpose of the Foundation is to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students who intend to pursue research careers in these fields.

Jon Galazka won the 2014 Perkins Award as most outstanding post-doctoral researcher at the recent international Neurospora 2014 conference held at Asilomar, CA.

Jon presented three posters and one talk, all dedicated to his work on Neurospora centromeres and gene silencing.

His talk was on adapting “HiC”, a version of chromosome conformation capture, for Neurospora and testing the influence of heterochromatin mutants on three-dimensional chromosome interactions.

At the same meeting Michael Freitag received the Beadle and Tatum Award, which is handed out every other year “in recognition of outstanding and original research using Neurospora as a model organism”.The prize comes with reproductions of lantern slides prepared by George Beadle for the first talk on isolating mutants defective in the expression of genes  required for metabolism in 1941, the beginning of “Biochemical Genetics”. Visit Michael’s office for a closer look. 

(above) Lantern slides by George Beadle

The Office of Undergraduate Research announced that Justin Biel is OSU’s first Undergraduate Researcher of the Year.  A senior honors student in biochemistry/biophysics, Biel has done research at OSU with Dr. Andy Karplus and Dr. Elisar Barbar.  He participated in the HHMI Summer undergraduate research program and plans a research career in biophysics.  He will attend UCSF in pursuit of his Ph.D. beginning this fall.

Earlier this year Biel was awarded the title of “Best Undergraduate Talk,” at the West Coast Protein Crystallography Workshop XXI 2013, which was held in Monterey, California on March 17-20, 2013.

His talk, “Bent out of Shape: All Prolyl Peptides Deviate from Planarity,” was the only one given by an undergraduate at the meeting. The workshop leaders were so impressed they created the award for him.

The Office of Undergraduate Research announced recently the winners of the poster competition for the Celebrating Undergraduate Excellence (CUE) event.  In the College of Science, the winners were Ms Ana Brar and Mr. Justin Biel who tied for first place.  Ana is a senior working with Dr. John Hays and Justin is a senior working with Dr. Andy Karplus.  Honorable mention for the college award was given to Ms Qiuying Liu, a senior working with Dr. Jeffrey Greenwood.