Biosciences News

Jillian Banfield, faculty scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area with a secondary appointment in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division, has been elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society. She is among fifty scientists who were selected for this honor in recognition of their exceptional contributions to science. Banfield, who is also a professor at UC Berkeley, studies the structure, functioning and diversity of microbial communities in natural environments and the human microbiome. Read more in the Royal Society press release.

Three scientists affiliated with the Biosciences Area have been recognized by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), one as the recipient of an NAS award and two as newly elected members. On Sunday, the NAS formally presented its 2018 NAS Award in Chemical Sciences to Jennifer Doudna, a faculty biochemist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division. Judith Campisi, a biochemist affiliated with Biological Systems and Engineering Division, Ehud “Udi” Isacoff, an MBIB faculty biologist, are among the group of 84 new members elected to the NAS.

Berkeley Lab played host to 31 neuroscience experts from across the country who came to participate in the fifth Neurodata Without Borders: Neurophysiology (NWB:N) project hackathon. The event was organized locally by Computing Sciences Area researchers Oliver Ruebel and Andrew Tritt, and Biosciences’ Kristofer Bouchard, a computational biologist in Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE).

Regulation of the enzyme telomerase has been implicated in cancer, other human diseases, and aging, but progress towards therapeutic manipulation of telomerase has been hampered by the lack of high-resolution structural data. Now, researchers in senior faculty scientist Eva Nogales’ lab in Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB), in collaboration with UC Berkeley professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology Kathleen Collins, have published a paper in Nature describing the 3-D molecular structure of the human telomerase enzyme.

The 7th Annual East Bay STEM Career Awareness Day took place on April 26 at Wareham Development’s Aquatic Park Center in West Berkeley, home to Biosciences Operations @ Berkeley and several Area research groups. The event, organized by the Institute for STEM Education housed at California State University East Bay, had support from Berkeley Lab and several East Bay-based businesses.