April 10, 2007

Renowned Professor/Chemist/Researcher at Kalamazoo College

KALAMAZOO, MI—Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi will be giving the Kalamazoo College 2007 Tourtellotte Lecture at 7 p.m. on Monday, April 16, in the Light Fine Arts Building on Academy Street. Bertozzi’s presentation is titled, “Chemistry in Living Systems: New Tools for Probing the Glycome.” The lecture is free and open to the public.

Bertozzi is a native of Boston, Mass., and attended Harvard University, where she earned her A.B. in Chemistry in 1988. She moved to UC Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry working with Professor Mark Bednarski on the synthesis and biological activity of C-glycosides. After graduating in 1993, she pursued postdoctoral research at UCSF with Professor Steven Rosen, studying the activity of endothelial oligosaccharides in promoting leukocyte adhesion at sites of inflammation. Bertozzi returned to Berkeley as a member of the faculty in 1996.

Bertozzi is now Director of the Molecular Foundry at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is the T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at UCSF. Prof. Bertozzi is member of several Scientific Advisory Boards of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and an editorial board member for numerous scientific journals. She is co-Editor-in-Chief of Current Opinion in Chemical Biology. Bertozzi is a member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been recognized with numerous awards including a MacArthur Foundation award, ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, Irving Sigal Award from the Protein Society, Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, ACS Cope Scholars award, and the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.

Bertozzi says about her lecture: “A major lesson from eukaryotic genome sequencing projects is that the absolute number of genes an organism's genome encodes is not the best parameter for defining complexity of function. It appears that the complex functions associated with human health and disease are determined by combinatorial expansion of genomic information in the form of posttranslational modifications. Of these, the most complex and ubiquitous is glycosylation, highlighting the importance of glycomics as a new frontier in the biosciences. This presentation will focus on new chemical approaches for profiling glycosylation at the systems level in both cells and living animals.”

Bertozzi’s research focuses on applications of chemistry and nanoscience in the study of cellular processes. Her group has developed chemical approaches for profiling changes in cell surface glycosylation associated with cancer and identified metabolic pathways in Mycobacterium tuberculosis that are candidate drug targets. In addition, Bertozzi’s group has developed new materials engineered at the nanometer scale to mimic the biological materials mucin and bone. Finally, her group has developed biomimetic coatings for nanotubes that enable their use in biological systems.

A Fellowship in Learning: At Home in the World, Kalamazoo College is a national liberal arts college and the creator and home of the Kalamazoo Plan. By emphasizing scholarship, civic engagement, and foreign study, Kalamazoo College cultivates a fellowship in learning among students, faculty, and a community of scholars throughout the world. Its students shape elements of the Kalamazoo Plan—rigorous academics, career internships, study abroad, service-learning, and a senior individualized project—into an educational experience that provides insight into the meaning of the kind of citizenship that is at home in the world.