Chemistry lecture: 'Radicals: Your Life in Their Hands'

LAWRENCE — Professor JoAnne Stubbe, Novartis Professor of Chemistry and professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present “Radicals: Your Life in Their Hands” for the Seventh Biennial Richard L. Schowen Lecture in Bioorganic Chemistry.

The public lecture will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 10, in 3020 Pharmacy Building.

Stubbe’s pioneering research has focused on how nature harnesses the reactivity of free radicals to carry out complex chemistry with exquisite specificity. She has studied the mechanism of ribonucleotide reductase enzymes, which are involved in the transformation of RNA building blocks to DNA building blocks, and are important antitumor and antiviral targets.

Among her numerous distinctions, Stubbe was awarded the 2008 National Medal of Science. In addition, she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has co-authored more than 300 publications.

She earned a bachelor’s degree with high honors in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and a doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, and performed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles and Brandeis University. She has held faculty positions at Williams College, Yale University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and since 1987 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stubbe also will present “Site-specific Incorporation of Unnatural Amino Acids to Investigate an Oxidation over 35 Å in Class I Ribonucleotide Reductases” at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 11, in 1001 Malott Hall.

The Schowen Lecture series is funded by former students, colleagues and friends of Richard L. Schowen, Summerfield Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, Molecular Biosciences and Pharmaceutical Chemistry, who retired in July 2000 after 37 years of teaching chemistry at KU. Schowen's career spanned a broad range of expertise in the chemical, biological and pharmaceutical sciences. His numerous awards include Fellow of the American Chemical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Dolph Simons Sr. Higuchi Award for Research in the Biomedical Sciences. Schowen serve for 16 years as associate editor and as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.