Frontiers of Science: Venki Ramakrishnan

Tuesday, September 26 at 7 pm
Natural History Museum of Utah

The University of Utah College of Health and the College of Science invite you to join us on Tuesday, September 26 at 7 pm for the free Frontiers of Science lecture My Adventures in the Ribosome, featuring Nobel Prize Laureate Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan. This event will take place at:

Natural History Museum of Utah
Rio Tinto Center | University of Utah
301 Wakara Way
Salt Lake City Utah, 84108

The ribosome is the ancient and enormous molecular machine that reads genetic information on mRNA to synthesize the proteins that are essential for all life. Ramakrishnan will talk about his efforts to determine the structure of the ribosome, and what was learned from it about one of the most fundamental processes in biology. Dr. Ramakrishnan will also talk about his career path, which involved living in three continents and switching from physics to biology.

Doors open at 6:30 pm. Immediately following the lecture, attendees will be invited to tour the museum's new ribosome exhibit.

This event is free to the public and RSVPs are not required, but encouraged, by September 20.

 

Frontiers of Science: Venki Ramakrishnan
Will you be bringing a guest (or guests)?

Questions about this event? Please contact Katelin Goings at Katelin.Goings@utah.edu.

About our Speaker

Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan

Venki Ramakrishnan received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Baroda University in India in 1971 and his Ph.D. in physics from Ohio University in 1976. He then studied biology for two years at the University of California, San Diego before beginning his postdoctoral work with Peter Moore at Yale University. After a long career in the USA at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Utah, he moved to England in 1999, where he has been a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009 and was the president of the Royal Society from 2015-2020.

In 2000, his laboratory determined the atomic structure of the 30S ribosomal subunit and its complexes with ligands and antibiotics. This work led to insights into how the ribosome “reads” the genetic code, as well as antibiotic function. Ramakrishnan’s lab subsequently determined high-resolution structures of functional complexes of the entire ribosome at various stages along the translational pathway, which led to insights into its role in protein synthesis during decoding, peptidyl transfer, translocation and termination. More recently his laboratory has been applying cryoelectron microscopy to study eukaryotic and mitochondrial translation and its regulation.

Ramakrishnan is the author of Gene Machine, a very frank, popular memoir about the race for the structure of the ribosome.