(photo by Susan Urmy)
Forum to focus on nature’s therapeutics
“The Hunt for Nature's Therapeutics” will be the subject of the 16th annual Joel G. Hardman student-invited Pharmacology forum on Thursday, April 19.
The forum, which will be held from 10 a.m. to 2:15 p.m. in 208 Light Hall, will feature nationally known experts in medical botany and pharmacognosy, the study of drugs in their crude, or natural state.
The 2007 faculty teaching and student teaching assistant awards also will be announced during the forum, which is named for the former chair of Pharmacology.
Speakers include:
• Jin-Hui Dou, Ph.D., member of the Botanical Review Team in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Drug Evaluation and Research;
• Norman Farnsworth, Ph.D., director of the Program for Collaborative Research in the Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago;
• William Setzer, Ph.D., member of the Natural Products Group at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who will describe the search for new medicines in Costa Rica's “cloudforest,” and;
• Shirley Pomponi, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution in Ft. Pierce, Fla., who will discuss “Sponges as Chemical Factories.” Pomponi is co-discoverer of the sponge that produces discodermolide, a chemical compound currently in human clinical trials as a cancer treatment.
A reception and poster session will follow the forum in the third-floor breezeway of the Robinson Research Building.
For more information, contact Karen Gieg, Pharmacology Graduate Program Coordinator, at 322-1182 or karen.gieg@vanderbilt.edu.