Brenda Schulman, Ph.D., a member of the Departments of Structural Biology and Tumor Cell Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, kicks off the 2013 Flexner Discovery Lecture series on Thursday, Jan. 10.
Her talk, “Twists and turns in ubiquitin conjugation cascades,” is also the Lubomir S. Hnilica Lectureship and will begin at 4 p.m. in 208 Light Hall.
Schulman and her colleagues study the modification of proteins by ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like proteins, an important regulatory process in cells. The addition of ubiquitin or other ubiquitin-like proteins to a target protein can alter its function in many different ways, such as by marking it for degradation, or changing its location, activity or interaction with other proteins.
Defects in ubiquitin and ubiquitin-like regulatory pathways have been associated with diseases such as cancer, neurodegenerative disorders and viral infections.
Schulman is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and also serves as co-director of the Program in Molecular Oncology at St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Beckman Young Investigator Award and a Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences Award.
The Department of Biochemistry and the Center for Structural Biology are sponsoring Schulman’s lecture. For a complete schedule of the Flexner Discovery Lecture series and archived video of previous lectures, go to www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries.
