LCID Assistant Director Dr. Jaquelin Dudley is shown with her mentor, Dr. Harold Varmus, and her mentee, Dr. Wendy Kaichun Xu, at the recent Fifty Years of Reverse Transcriptase conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory held April 20-23, 2022. Dr. Dudley and Dr. Varmus both spoke at the Symposium.

Dr. Varmus is a former Director of the National Institutes of Health. He has many accolades and is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Varmus

THE JOHN R. LAMONTAGNE LECTURE SERIES

2022 LaMontagne Lecture - March 22, 2022, 3:00 p.m.

Link to Taped Lecture: https://video.ibm.com/recorded/131521908

The 2022 keynote speaker was Jason McLellan, Ph.D., Welch Chair in Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biosciences, The University of Texas at Austin. The title of his lecture was Coronavirus Vaccines: How We Got Here and Where We Are Going. The event was held at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center. The recording of the lecture can be found at the link above.

Dr. McLellan has worked to understand how viral protein structures operate. Viral protein structure and function are important for the development of vaccines and potential treatments for deadly viruses that have impacted the lives of billions of people. Dr. McLellan and his collaborators have engineered a key protein of coronaviruses for use in vaccines. His team has developed technology found in many leading vaccines against COVID-19 (Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and Novavax). This discovery led to his selection as Texas Inventor of the Year by the State Bar of Texas’s Intellectual Property Section, which annually recognizes individuals and their inventions that have “significantly impacted the Texas economy.” McLellan and his colleagues also designed key proteins that form the basis of several vaccines.  These vaccines are directed against coronaviruses as well as respiratory syncytial virus, a virus especially dangerous for young children and seniors. He is the winner of multiple scientific awards, and his research and expertise have been featured in multiple media outlets.

2021 LaMontagne Lecture - March 23, 2021

Our 2021 keynote speaker was Dr. Mary Estes, Distinguished Professor of Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Her research group studies viruses that infect distinct types of cells (enterocytes, crypt cells, M cells) in the GI tract as probes to learn about the biology, host response and gene expression of these cells, using multidisciplinary approaches to probe the structure and molecular biology of GI viruses to understand the basic mechanisms that control virus replication, morphogenesis, virus-host interactions, and pathogenesis.