Interdisciplinary Life Science Symposium held tomorrow
Day-long event celebrates opening of LSEB
In honor of the newly opened Life Science and Engineering Building, at 24 Cummington St., (formerly the Nickelodeon Theatre), BU has organized a symposium on interdisciplinary science that includes Nobel Prize–winning scientists.
The Boston University Symposium on Interdisciplinary Research in the Life Sciences is scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday, October 12, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The University’s life sciences faculty — from the College of Arts and Sciences departments of chemistry and biology and the College of Engineering biomedical engineering department and Bioinformatics Graduate Program — will play host to distinguished scientists from across the country, including a stellar roster of featured speakers.
Each visiting speaker will be paired with a BU scientist, with the aim of showing how interdisciplinary research in the life sciences will grow and change in the future, at BU and elsewhere. Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of the significant missions of the new Cummington Street building, bringing together colleagues whose research interests dovetail, but whose departments have typically been separated both physically and institutionally.
Among the visiting scientists are:
Jeremy Berg, the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, whose $1.8 billion budget funds basic biomedical research in cell biology, biophysics, genetics, pharmacology, biological chemistry, physiology, and bioinformatics and computational biology;
Robert Langer, the Kenneth J. Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering at MIT and one of the most influential figures in biotechnology;
Phillip Sharp, MIT Institute Professor, the founding director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a leading cancer researcher, and a cowinner with Richard Roberts (for their separate discovery of split genes) of the 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine;
Richard Roberts, a cowinner with Phillip Sharp of the 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine, and research director at New England Biolabs.
The event is open to the public. For a schedule of events, click here.