Vermont Medicine Magazine
DEPARTMENT OF Microbiology and Molecular Genetics ~ 2012 Annual Report
Selected Highlights
- Faculty members serve on 18 editorial boards including prestigious journals such as Structure; PLoS Biology; Journal of Biological Chemistry; DNA Repair; and Eukaryotic Cell.
- Over the past year, faculty members have given 41 presentations at national and international meetings and at universities all over the world.
- Gary Ward, Ph.D., was elected to the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering.
- Aimee Shen, Ph.D., was one of twenty-two young scientists nationwide to be chosen as a Pew Scholar.
Susan S. Wallace, Ph.D., Chair
The Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics (MMG) and its 17 faculty members play important roles in the research and educational missions of the College and the University. The department has 24 doctoral students, teaches medical students in the Vermont Integrated Curriculum and offers two undergraduate degrees, one in Microbiology and the other in Molecular Genetics.
The department has three principal research foci, Microbiology and Microbial Pathogenesis, Protein-Nucleic Acid Transactions, and Bioinformatics. A small but growing number of faculty members in the department are bioinformaticists; their work interfaces with and supports the research of bench scientists in the department and the College. We welcome a new bioinformaticist to the department, Dawei Li, Ph.D., who hails from Yale University and is a Neuroscience Spire hire. The MMG faculty members whose research focuses on microbiology collaborate with adjunct MMG faculty from Infectious Diseases and Animal Sciences. These faculty members also work together in the Immunology and Infectious Disease Center of Biomedical Research Excellence Program (COBRE). The faculty whose research focuses on proteins and nucleic acids interact with adjunct MMG faculty from biochemistry and are part of a National Cancer Institute-funded Program Project.
This year MMG faculty members have published 63 papers in high profile journals including several in PLoS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Molecular Biology, Molecular Microbiology, and Structure. David Pederson, Ph.D., gave a symposium talk on his work on DNA repair and nucleosomes at the 4th EU/USA Conference on DNA Base Damage and Repair in Oslo, Norway. Sylvie Doublié, Ph.D., was both an invited speaker and session chair at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) Nucleic Acid Enzymes Conference and Markus Thali, Ph.D., was co-organizer of the 6th FASEB Conference on Tetraspanis. Aimee Shen, Ph.D., was an invited speaker at the International Proteolysis Meeting. Susan Wallace, Ph.D., Department Chair, was an invited speaker at DNA Repair meetings in Prague and Norway and gave the Plenary Lecture at the Environmental Mutagen Society Annual Meeting in Seattle where she received the 2012 EMS Award for “Fundamental studies on the repair of DNA damage caused by environmental agents and for her exemplary leadership in science.”
Last modified January 24 2013 09:39 AM
