Twenty-third Annual Timothy J. O'Leary Lecture
Dr. James J. McCarthy, Ph.D. will be the Twenty-third Annual Timothy J. O'Leary, S.J., Lecturer. Prof. McCarthy's Public Lecture, "How and Why Earth's Climate is Changing" will be 7:30 pm Tuesday evening, October 28, 2008, in the Globe Room of Cataldo House on campus. The O'Leary Scientific Lecture, "Rapid Climate Change in the Arctic: Why it Should Concern Us", will be Monday, October 27, 2008, at noon in the Wolff Auditorium of Jepson.
Dr. MCarthy received his undergraduate degree in biology from Gonzaga University, and his Ph.D. from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His research interests relate to the regulation of plankton productivity in the sea, and in recent years have focused on regions that are strongly affected by seasonal and interannual variation in climate. He is an author of many scientific papers, and he currently teaches courses on biological oceanography and biogeochemical cycles, marine ecosystems, and global change and human health.
For the past two decades Dr. McCarthy has worked as an author, reviewer, and as a co-chair with the Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For the Third IPCC Assessment, he headed Working Group II, which had responsibilities for assessing impacts of and vulnerabilities to global climate change. He was also one of the lead authors on the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and a Vice-Chair of the 2007 Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment.
Dr. McCarthy is the current president of the AAAS, our nation's largest scientific association.
Twenty-second Annual Timothy J. O'Leary Lecture
The Twenty-second Annual Timothy J. O'Leary S. J., Lecture will be presented by Harry F. Noller, Ph.D. The lecture series will be on April 14 and 15, 2008. Dr. Noller's Public lecture on April 14 is titled, "Ribosomes: Ancient Molecular Machines that Translate the Genetic Code."
Dr. Noller graduated from UC, Berkeley in 1960 and completed his Ph.D. in chemistry at the Univesity of Oregon in 1965. After NIH Post-doctoral Fellowships in Cambridge, England and Geneva, Switzerland, he joined the faculty at UC, Santa Cruz in 1968. Since 1992 he has served as Director, Center for Molecular Biology of RNA.
Ribosomes are critical to life. They are complex molecular assemblies that build proteins in living cells according to the instructions encoded in the cell's DNA. The Noller Laboratory worked out the structure of a complete ribosome in the bacterium Thermus thermophilus. This information led to greater understanding of the process of protein synthesis. In addition to expanding our scientific knowledge, Dr. Noller's work promises new strategies to design antibiotics, a subject of increasing interest as we encounter more bacteria that have evolved resistance to existing drugs. For his leadership and accomplishments in the study of ribosomes, Dr. Noller has been recognized with several prestigious awards including in 2007 the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in Germany and the Gairdner International Award presented by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Twenty-first Annual Timothy J. O'Leary Lecture
The Twenty-first Annual Timothy J. O'Leary S. J., Lecture will be presented by Gregory A. Petsko, D. Phil., titled, "The Next Epidemic: What We're Trying to do about Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other Neurological Diseases."
The Public Lecture will be Thursday, November 2, 2006 at 7:30 P.M. in the Globe Room of the Cataldo House, Gonzaga University.
Prof. Petsko's research interests center upon the structural basis of biochemical properties. His approach is to bring a chemical perspective to bear on problems in biochemistry, structural biology, cell biology and human health.
Among numerous awards, in 1995 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Although directing a Center with 16 faculty and 200 staff, Prof. Petsko always carries a full teaching load, and is proud of having taught freshman chemistry continuously, with only time off for sabbaticals, for almost 20 years. He also teaches critical thinking, protein crystallography, and the history of the detective story.
Previous O'Leary Distinguished Scientists
1984 - Melvin Calvin 1985 - Henry A. Bent 1986 - Henry Taube
1987 - Michael Kasha 1988 - Roald Hoffmann 1989 - Harry B. Gray
1992 - E. James Davis 1993 - Carl Djerassi 1994 - Jacqueline Barton
1995 - Thomas Cech 1996 - Leroy Hood 1997 - Peter Raven
1998 - Ursula Goodenough 1999 - Leon Lederman 2000 - Richard Zare
2001 - Lawrence Krause 2002 - J. Michael Bishop 2003 - Eugenie C. Scott
2004 - Raymond B. Huey 2005 - George V. Coyne, S.J. 2006 - Gregory A. Petsko
2008 - Harry Noller
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