Biosciences News

March is Women’s History Month, a time to recognize and celebrate the diverse and historic accomplishments of women. The theme for 2016 is to honor women who have shaped America’s history and its future through their public service and government leadership. In honor or Women’s History Month Berkeley Lab has profiled Facilities Division Director Reva Nickelson, as well as two Biosciences women, Shiela Dixson and Lauren Lui:

Shiela Dixson, a financial analyst matrixed to the Biosciences University/Hill Operations, who left the Lab March 15 for a new position at Livermore, talks about achieving her life goals of obtaining her MBA and creating a nonprofit for mentoring underprivileged girls.

Lauren Lui, a postdoctoral fellow in Adam Arkin’s bioengineering lab, has been at the Lab for only 5 months but has already taken on the role of secretary with the Lab’s Women Scientists and Engineers Council. As a postdoc, she says, having a good mentor is key to a female scientist’s career.

Read their inspiring stories on the Diversity & Inclusion at Berkeley Lab website.

Recently, scientists from University of California, San Francisco, performed research at two national laboratories to determine protein structures that c0uld be the key to preventing Ebola infection. Alexander Kintzer and Robert Stroud, used two structural biology beamlines (5.0.2 and 8.3.1) at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, to determine in atomic detail how a potential drug molecule fits into and blocks a channel in cell membranes that Ebola and related “filoviruses” need to infect victims’ cells. The study, published March 9 in Nature, marks an important step toward finding a cure for Ebola and other diseases that depend on the channel. Read more at the SLAC News Center.

“I started out my career in medicine. Now that the Institute is running on all its scientific cylinders as a state of the art DOE Office of Science Genomic User Facility, I plan to return to these roots and focus my attention on addressing an important problem in human health.”

After 14 years guiding the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute from completing DOE’s contributions to the Human Genome Project to transitioning the Institute into a National User Facility enabling the science of thousands of researchers focused on energy and environmental problems, DOE JGI Director Eddy Rubin announced on March 10, 2016 that he will be stepping down later this year.

Once a successor is found and brought onboard, Rubin will move to a position as Chief Scientific Officer for San Francisco-based startup Metabiota, a big data analytics company focused on infectious diseases and epidemic risk. Read more about Rubin’s announcement on the DOE JGI website.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will partner with four clean energy small businesses to accelerate the commercialization of their innovative bioenergy, buildings and vehicle technologies as part of the Small Business Vouchers (SBV) pilot launched in July 2015 by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). One of those businesses is Lygos, Inc., a local business that has partnered with the Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU) in the past to achieve pilot-scale production of malonic acid from sugar. Lygos will conduct the necessary testing at the APBDU to overcome current barriers to scale-up, and then move production to the large-scale fermenters at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center.

Jay Keasling, Associate Laboratory Director for Biosciences, has announced that Paul Adams has accepted the position of Division Director for the Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division. Adams served as the MBIB Interim Division Director since the Biosciences Area re-organization took effect this past October 1 and has been instrumental in developing a strategic plan and leading the effort to launch the Division.