News Article


RSS Subscribe to Gonzaga University's News Service RSS Feed

Dateline: 10/19/2006

GONZAGA UNIVERSITY NEWS RELEASE
Dale Goodwin, Director
Peter Tormey, Associate Director

Petsko to Deliver O'Leary Lecture Nov. 2

Dr. Gregory Petsko
Dr. Gregory Petsko
Brandeis University Professor Gregory Petsko will discuss, “The Next Epidemic: What We’re Trying to Do about Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other Neurologic Diseases” at Gonzaga University’s 21st annual Timothy J. O’Leary, S.J., Lecture at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 2.

The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held in the Globe Room of Cataldo Hall on the GU campus. Petsko is the Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacodynamics at Brandeis, and also directs Brandeis’ Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center. He is an adjunct professor in the department of neurology and the Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Petsko graduated Summa Cum Laude from Princeton University in 1970, and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he completed his doctoral research in 1973. He joined the Brandeis faculty in 1990, having previously been a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor 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. He has received numerous awards, including election in 1995 to the National Academy of Sciences and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Although directing a center with 16 faculty and 200 staff, Petsko has always carried a full teaching load, and is proud of having taught freshman chemistry continuously, with time off only for sabbaticals, for almost 20 years. He also teaches critical thinking, protein crystallography, and the history of the detective story.

The annual lecture series is presented by the GU science departments in honor of the late Rev. Timothy O’Leary, S.J., devoted priest and chemistry professor at Gonzaga from 1933 until his death in 1975.

Friends and former students of Rev. O’Leary established an endowment fund to bring a noted scientist to campus each year in his honor. Rev. O’Leary was described by his students as a superb lecturer, and his classes were known for their clarity of presentation. A native of Butte, Mont., Rev. O'Leary was a generous and gifted counselor, teacher and priest.

For more information please contact Howard Glass, Ph.D., director of the Inland Northwest Natural Resources Center at Gonzaga, at (509) 323-3888 or via e-mail at glassh@gonzaga.edu.