By Whitney Harder
(March 2, 2015) — Featuring world-renowned scientists, the University of Kentucky’s 2015 Naff Symposium will host three prize-winning chemistry experts Friday, March 6, at the William T. Young Library's UK Athletics Auditorium. A poster session will be held in conjunction with the symposium in Room B108C at William T. Young Library.
Presented by the Department of Chemistry in the UK College of Arts and Sciences, the chemistry and molecular biology symposium is interdisciplinary in nature, and is attended by students and faculty in the chemistry, biochemistry, biology, pharmacy, engineering, agriculture and medical fields from UK, as well as other colleges and universities in Kentucky and surrounding states.
The symposium was established in honor of Anna S. Naff, a University of Kentucky graduate, through the generous support of Dr. Benton Naff of the National Institutes of Health.
Each year, it brings leading scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, to campus to share their expertise. The topic of this year’s symposium is “Single Molecule Approaches to Deciphering Molecular Interactions in Biology.” Presenters include:
• Philip Tinnefeld, Institute of Physical & Theoretical Chemistry, Braunschweig University of Technology, presenting “DNA Origami Nanophotonics: from Superresolution to Functional Devices”;
• Taekjip Ha, co-director of the Center for the Physics of Living Cells, University of Illinois, presenting “Genome Maintenance Up Close and Personal: Eavesdropping on Single Molecular Conversations”; and
• Carlos Bustamante, Raymond & Beverly Sackler Chair of Biophysics, University of California, Berkeley, presenting “Division of Labor and Coordination Among the Subunits of a Nearly Perfect Biological Machine.”
A full schedule of events and the presenters’ abstracts and biographies are available at https://chem.as.uky.edu/naff-symposium.
The 2015 Naff Committee members include Department of Chemistry professors Chris Richards, Jason DeRouchey, Marcelo Guzman and Anne-Francis Miller. For more information about the 2015 Naff Symposium, contact Chris Richards.
