In his inaugural Research Town Hall in January, Steven R. Goodman, PhD, vice chancellor for Research at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, announced several new initiatives.
One of them, the VCR Distinguished Lecture Series, designed to bring outstanding researchers to campus for talks, kicks off today at 1 p.m. with Betty Pace, MD, Tedesco Distinguished Chair in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia. Dr. Pace will present a lecture titled, “Sickle Cell Disease: Novel Drug Therapy Focused on Clinical Phenotypes.”
Dr. Pace, who maintains an active sickle cell research laboratory and training program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has served as director of the UT Dallas Sickle Cell Disease Research Center, directs the Pediatric Comprehensive Sickle Cell Program at Augusta University, and is a member of the Augusta University Sickle Cell Disease Research Center.
The VCR series continues on March 17, when Leszek Kotula, MD, PhD, associate professor in the Cancer Biology and Prostate Cancer Research Program at SUNY Upstate Medical University, will lecture on the topic, “Human Spectrin SH3 Domain Binding Protein1: From Red Cells to Prostate Cancer.”
Dr. Kotula has been working in the areas of genetics, molecular and cell biology and cancer biology for the past 27 years. His research has been independently funded by grants from the NIH, the Department of Defense, the American Heart Association, and several foundations.
On April 14, Stephen J. Glatt, PhD, director of the Psychiatric Genetic Epidemiology and Neurobiology Laboratory at SUNY Upstate Medical University, will speak about “Genetic Risk Factors, Genomic Biomarkers, and Biological Mechanisms of Major Psychiatric Disorders.” Dr. Glatt is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University.
Professor Douglas Kell, research chair in Bioanalytical Sciences in the School of Chemistry at Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre at the University of Manchester, England, will speak on June 16. The title of his lecture will be, “The Cellular Uptake of Pharmaceutical Drugs is Transporter‐Mediated, and Thus a Problem not of Biophysics but of Systems Biology.”
Dr. Goodman said the lecture series will continue on an annual basis. “We’re starting the lecture series now, but it’s going to be every year,” he said. “Next year, we’ll start at the very beginning of the academic year, and go throughout the year. That will be true in each subsequent year.”
The lectures will take place from 1 to 2 p.m. in Room 101 of the Pharmacy Building.