Skip to main content

Structural biologist, focused on cell transport machinery, to join faculty

by WYNNE PARRY Jue Chen, a structural biologist whose research focuses on transporter proteins that act as the cell’s pumping machinery, will join Rockefeller as professor and head of laboratory in July. Dr. Chen, currently a tenured professor of biology at Purdue University in Indiana, is especi...

Drug discovery fund begins making grants

by LESLIE CHURCH A new $25 million initiative, created earlier this academic year to help develop basic research discoveries into new medical therapies, has had a promising launch, with $1.55 million in awards granted to Rockefeller scientists in its initial phase. The first awards are for proof-...

Inaugural ‘Science Saturday’ draws families

Watch and learn. An attendee of Rockefeller’s Science Saturday event, held in May, looks on as A. James Hudspeth, F.M. Kirby Professor and head of the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, demonstrates how nerve cells send electrical signals. Jointly hosted by the Development Office’s Parents & Sc...

Tri-I drug discovery institute soon to announce first projects

by LESLIE CHURCH The Tri-Institutional Therapeutics Discovery Institute (Tri-I TDI), an initiative with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College begun last fall to help expedite early-stage drug discovery, will announce this month the first projects it has selected...

IT amps up bandwidth, eases genomic data transfers

by LESLIE CHURCH For labs on campus that sequence genomes — and share those large data sets with other institutions — a recent quadrupling in internet bandwidth means an end to the practice of slowing down uploads or scheduling them during overnight hours. In April the university upgraded its i...

Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande awarded Lewis Thomas Prize

by LESLIE CHURCH Among the limits of modern medicine is the element of human error. Atul Gawande, surgeon, professor, writer and public health researcher, reminds us that doctors make mistakes. But as an advocate for reducing error and increasing efficiency in health care, he also wants to help t...

Nobel laureate and longtime faculty member Gerald Edelman dies at 84

by LESLIE CHURCH Gerald M. Edelman, a Rockefeller alumnus, former faculty member and Nobel laureate who uncovered the chemical structure of the antibody in 1961, died on May 18 at the age of 84. A graduate of Henry Kunkel’s laboratory and a member of the university’s second graduating class, D...

Milestones

Awarded: C. David Allis, the 2014 Japan Prize in Life Sciences from the Japan Prize Foundation, for his pioneering work in epigenetics and his discovery that chemical modifications of DNA-packaging proteins play a key role in regulating the activity of individual genes. The prize, worth approxima...

Twenty-four students receive Ph.D.s at Rockefeller’s 56th Convocation

The Rockefeller University awarded doctoral degrees to 24 students at its convocation ceremony today. Additionally, the university awarded three honorary degrees, to John Gurdon, Julian Robertson and Sinya Yamanaka. Gurdon and Yamanaka are 2012 Nobel Prize laureates known for discoveries related ...

To recover consciousness, brain activity passes through newly detected states

Anesthesia makes otherwise painful procedures possible by derailing a conscious brain, rendering it incapable of sensing or responding to a surgeon’s knife. But little research exists on what happens when the drugs wear off. “I always found it remarkable that someone can recover from anesthesia...