We would like to thank everyone for their support for our first annual symposium! The symposium took place on May 13-14, 2015, on the campus of Purdue University. The 2015 symposium organizers were: Duy Phuong Hua, Satchal Erramilli, Adriano Mendes, Brendan Sullivan, Phillip Rushton, Sakshi Tomar, and faculty advisor Dr. Carol Post.

 

We would also like to extend a thank you to Dr. Anthony A. Kossiakoff, our keynote speaker, who completed his undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Chemistry (after starting as a history major) at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia. He then pursued his doctoral studies in Physical Chemistry at the University of Delaware. Dr. Kossiakoff spent the next four years at the California Institute of Technology as apostdoctoral scholar (working with Professor Robert Stroud) before joining Brookhaven National Labs as a Senior Biophysicist, where he developed applications of neutron diffraction to protein structural studies. He then worked at Genentech from 1983-1998, establishing and serving as the director of the Protein Engineering Department. He was also an adjunct professor at the University of California in San Francisco during this time. After spending a year as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago, Dr. Kossiakoff moved there in 1998, and is currently the Otho S. A. Sprague Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics. He is also a member of the Membrane Protein Structural Dynamics Consortium, a large-scale collaboration to elucidate the structure, function, and dynamics of membrane proteins. Dr. Kossiakoff’s research focuses on the molecular mechanism and energetics involved in hormone-induced receptor activation using a combination of X-ray crystallography, site-directed mutagenesis, phage display mutagenesis, and biophysical analysis. In addition, Dr. Kossiakoff’s group, along with Shohei Koide, has pioneered the technique of Chaperone-assisted Crystallography. Dr. Kossiakoff is an avid fly fisherman and a connoisseur of single-malt scotch.

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Internal funding sources for 2015 included: 

Department of Biological Sciences (Dr. Richard Kuhn)

Department of Biochemistry (Dr. Andrew Mesecar)

Department of Physics and Astronomy (Dr. John Finley)

Department of Chemistry (Dr. Timothy Zwier)

Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology (Dr. Zhong-Yin Zhang)

The Purdue Center for Cancer Research

The Graduate School – Office of Interdisciplinary Graduate Programs

PULSe - Interdisciplinary Life Science

PGSG (Purdue Graduate Student Government) 

We would also like to thank our corporate donors for their generous sponsorship:

Millipore(Jim Henderson)

Carl Zeiss Microscopy LLC (Sam Byerly)

Molecular Dimensions (Issa Isaac)

Qiagen (Andrew Fritts)

Rigaku (Angela Criswell)

TTP Labtech (Melanie Adams)

Anatrace (Ed Pryor)

Hinds Instruments (Connie Wimmer)

Beckman Coulter (Jona Kristo)

Mitegen (Ben Apker)

Fisher Scientific (Keven Peterson)

Sigma Aldrich (Rick Belcher)