CANCELED - Baylor Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Will Present Gooch-Stephens Lecture
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CANCELED: Due to illness, Dr. Peter G. Schultz, Scripps Family Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., will not be able to travel to Baylor to deliver the annual Gooch-Stephens Lectures at Baylor March 17-18. The lectures will be rescheduled at a later date.
Dr. Peter G. Schultz, Scripps Family Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., will lecture on Thursday, March 17, and Friday, March 18, in room B110 of the Baylor Sciences Building on the Baylor University campus.
The events, which are free and open to the public, are a part of the annual Gooch-Stephens Lecture Series, established in recognition of the contributions of two Baylor chemistry professors and former department chairmen, Dr. W.T. Gooch and Dr. W.R. Stephens.
Schultz's first lecture, "Expanding the Genetic Code," will be held at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 17. A reception will follow.
His second lecture, "A Chemist's Foray into Translational Research: From Stem Cells to Neglected Disease," will be held at 4 p.m. Friday, March 18. Refreshments will be served at 3:30 p.m. in the atrium of the Baylor Sciences Building.
Schultz's research focuses on the synthesis of molecules and molecular assemblies with novel physical, chemical or biological properties and functions. He has taken a biologically inspired approach to synthesis in which the molecules and processes of living organisms are combined with the principles and tools of chemistry to create molecules with new functions.
He will discuss examples of this approach, including the development and application of methods that make it possible to expand the genetic codes of living organisms to include unnatural amino acids with novel chemical reactivity, spectroscopic properties or biological activities; and the application of chemical and genomics tools to identify and characterize the mechanisms of small molecules that affect stem cell self-renewal and differentiation and the reprogramming of somatic cells.
Schultz completed his undergraduate and graduate work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., before joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1985, where he was professor of chemistry, Principal Investigator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
He joined the Scripps faculty in 1999. He founded and was the Institute Director of the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in San Diego from 1999 to 2010. In addition, he is a founder of Affymax Research Institute, Syrrx, Kalypsys, Phenomix, Symyx Therapeutics, Ilypsa, Ambrx and Wildcat Technologies, pioneers in the application of diversity-based approaches to problems in chemistry, materials science and medicine.
He has been awarded the Waterman Award of the National Science Foundation, membership in the National Academy of Sciences and National Institute of Medicine, the 1994 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the 2003 Paul Ehrlich Prize and the 2005 Arthur C. Cope Award of the American Chemical Society.
For more information, call (254) 710-3311 or visit https://www.baylor.edu/chemistry/.
by Katy McDowall, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805