Symposium Celebrating the 60th Birthday of Professor Douglas H. Turner

On August 25-26, 2006, Chemistry alumni chose to honor their mentor, Professor Douglas H. Turner by returning to the University of Rochester on the occasion of Doug's 60th birthday to surprise him with a symposium. Matthew Disney (Ph.D. '02) and Philip Bevilacqua (Ph.D. '94) initiated the Turner group reunion and over 50 former and current Turner alumni, associates and friends attended the full day symposium and celebration.

Morning Session I

Ryszard Kierzek, Professor, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Poznan, Poland
"The RNA chemistry of Olden Days"

Elzbieta Kierzek, Scientist, Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Poznan, Poland
"RNA Microarrays, a Useful Method for the Study of RNA Structure"

Alison Williams (Ph.D. '88), Associate Research Scholar, Princeton University "Time Resolved UV Resonance Raman Studies of Nucleic Acids: Poly A Revisited"

Afternoon Session I

Mark Burkard (Ph.D. '00), Medical Oncology/Hematology Fellow, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
"Cancer Kinases: Molecular Recognition of Ribonucleotide Analogs"

Gang Chen (Ph.D. '05), Postdoctoral Fellow in Laboratory of I. Tinoco, University of California, Berkeley
"Mechanical Manipulation of a Pseudoknot from Human Telomerase RNA"

Suzanne O'Handley (Ph.D. '91), Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Rochester Institute of Technology
"Discovery of Potential Novel Antibiotic Targets in Pathogenic Bacteria"

Amy Ruschak (B.S. '02), Graduate Student, Yale University
"Towards a Structural Description of IAPP(20-29) Fiber Nucleation"

Stephen Testa, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Kentucky
“Ribozyme-mediated Recombination Reactions”

Morning Session II

David H. Mathews (Ph.D. '01), Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of Rochester
"Computational Efficient Determination of Free Energy Changes"

John SantaLucia, Jr. (Ph.D. '91), Professor of Chemistry, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
"Progress Toward Accurate 3D Structure Prediction of RNA"

Afternoon Session II

Susan Schroeder (Ph.D. '02), Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
“Resistance at a Distance: Mechanisms of Anisomycin Resistance in H. marismortui”

Philip Bevilacqua (Ph.D. '94), Associate Professor of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University, PA
“pKa Shifting in RNA: There and Back Again”

Thomas Krugh, Professor of Chemistry, University of Rochester
Closing Remarks

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Photographs