December 2007 Featured News

Letter from Dean Allewell

As the semester draws to a close, we can celebrate many successes.  After our dedication ceremony in September, the Bioscience Research Building now houses 19 faculty members and nearly 140 undergraduate, graduate student, and postdoctoral researchers.  Newly acquired instrumentation in the Imaging Core Center and the Proteomics Core Facility, both funded by NIH instrumentation grants, will accelerate the pace of research in the new year.
Read more about the semester's successes >>

Bioscience Research Day Recognizes Innovation, Draws Venture Capitalists

Bioscience Day 2007 drew more than 800 participants from area universities, state and federal laboratories, and corporations focused on biomedical and biotechnology ventures, in addition to UM faculty, students and staff.  Featured topics included aging, public health, biology education, ecology, climate and atmospheric science, grant proposal writing, technology transfer entrepreneurship, nano-biotechnology, virology, and human disease. The "Professor Venture Fair' was a new highlight this year which featured 7 faculty inventors who pitched their ideas to 7 venture capitalists judges. Larry Sita, Chemistry & Biochemistry,(pictured at left) won the "Best Inventor Pitch" of the day. Read More >>

Dean Allewell to Lead UM Team in New DC area Health Research Consortium

Norma Allewell, Dean of the College of Chemical and Life Sciences, will lead the team of University of Maryland researchers participating in a new consortium of seven leading Washington, D.C. academic and health care institutions formed to compete for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding to help transform health care and research in the greater DC metropolitan region. Read more >>

Scorpion Toxin Makes Fungus More Lethal to Insect Pests

Entomology professor Raymond St. Leger has discovered how to use scorpion genes to create a hyper-virulent fungus that can kill specific insect pests, including the mosquitoes that carry malaria, and which does not contaminate the environment as chemical pesticides do.  Read more >>

College Poised to Accelerate Research Using Newly Aquired Instrumentation

The Maryland Pathogen Research Institute (MPRI) received an NIH Shared Instrumentation Grant award that will support the purchase of a state-of-the-art fluorescence-activated cell sorter, the proteomics facility in the Bioscience Research Building will have a new mass spectrometer supported by a multi-user NIH-grant authored by Dr. Catherine Fenselau, Chemistry/Biochemistry, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry also received NIH funds to purchase a small molecule and macromolecular x-ray diffraction machine. Read more>>

5th Biophysical Symposium Focuses on Biomolecular Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Institute for Physical Sciences and Techonology, and the Center for Biomolecular Structure and Organization held the 5th Biophysical Symposium at College Park –Biomolecular Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” on November 7, 2007. Read more >>

CLFS Students Win Merrill Scholarships

Two College of Chemical and Life Sciences students were honored with Merrill Presidential Scholarships this fall, Adam Fisch and Claire Ciarkowski. Read more >>

Keep up with Faculty News, Awards, and Honors

Looking to see who made the headlines, nabbed a grant, or was honored for their acheivements? Faculty news items will be updated at http://chemlife.umd.edu/faculty/. Please send news and notes to kellyb@umd.edu.

Upcoming Events

December 12: College Holiday Party, 2-4 PM in the Bioscience Research Building colonnade
December 20: College Commencement, 9 AM in the Memorial Chapel