Sessler Lectureship: Professor James R. Williamson, The Scripps Research Institute

Sessler Lectureship: Professor James R. Williamson, The Scripps Research Institute
Date
Wed January 24th 2007, 12:00am
Event Sponsor
Chemistry Department
Location
Carl F. Braun Lecture Hall

About the Seminar: 

"RNA Folding and RNP assembly: From Loops to Ribosomes"

This lecture will cover the evolution of my current research interests in 30S ribosome assembly from the humble beginnings of my thesis work at Stanford University in the 1980s. We have applied the tools of chemistry and biophysics to understand the structure of RNA and RNP protein complexes, and the RNA folding events that occur during ribonucleo-protein complex formation. The first half of the lecture will discuss principles we have learned from studying HIV-RNA - protein complexes and ribozyme folding. 

In the second half of the lecture, a novel stable isotope pulse chase experiment will be discussed that has led to new insights into the complex process of assembly of the 30S ribosome.

About the Speaker:

Professor James R. Williamson is a native of New England, having lived in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. He was an undergraduate at Mount Union College in Alliance, Ohio, which is the Home of the Genie Garage Door Opener. He majored in Chemistry, earning a B.S. in Chemistry with Honors in 1981. 

Professor Williamson entered the graduate program in the Chemistry Department at Stanford University with the intention of pursuing synthetic organic chemistry, joining the laboratory of Professor Michael Pirrung. After several years, he joined the research group of Professor Steven Boxer to pursue his burgeoning interesting in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. He completed his thesis work on the structure and dynamics of DNA hairpins using NMR, and received his Ph.D. in 1988. 

As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Thomas R. Cech, Dr. Williamson studied the structure of the G-rich sequences found in telomeres, which are the structures at the ends of chromosomes. He joined the faculty in the Chemistry Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, where he attained the rank of Associate Professor with tenure in 1997. Dr. Williamson moved to The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA in 1998 as a Professor, where he is a member of the Department of Molecular Biology, the Department of Chemistry, and The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology. In 2001, he became the Associate Dean for the Chemistry Graduate Program.

Dr. Williamson's research involves the study RNA structure and RNA-protein interactions using biochemistry and structural biology approaches. The Williamson laboratory has investigated the interaction of the HIV regulatory proteins Tat and Rev with their RNA targets using NMR spectroscopy. They have developed a variety of methods for stable isotope labeling of nucleic acids to facilitate NMR structural work. In addition, they have extensively investigated the interactions of ribosomal proteins with RNA and the mechanism of ribosome assembly using fluorescence and calorimetry, adn the structure of ribosomal protein-RNA complexes using NMR and X-ray crystallography. A unifying theme of the work in the Williamson laboratory is understanding the conformational changes that are involved in formation of RNA-protein complexes. 

Dr. Williamson has few outside interests, except that he recently took up surfing, which is harder than it looks.