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06/11/2015

Annual CBITG Symposium big draw for students and professors

Recent research from the research group of Professor

More than 100 graduate students, post-doctorate researchers, and faculty members from more than 10 departments attended the annual National Institutes of Health Chemistry-Biology Interface Training Grant (CBITG) Symposium.  

The event featured a variety of speakers from fields that bridge chemistry and biology research, including  Daniel Appella, Ph.D., from the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases; Professor Matthew Bogyo from Stanford University; Naimul Karim, Ph.D., from 3M; Kimberly Maize, University of Minnesota doctoral candidate; Lisa Marcaurelle, Ph.D., from H3 Biomedicine; Professor Larry Masterson from Hamline University; Professor William Pomerantz from the University of Minnesota; and Professor Markus Ribbe from the University of California-Irvine.  

Topics presented at the symposium included synthetic chemical libraries for drug screening, X-ray crystallography, enzyme kinetics, imaging in whole animals, peptide-nucleic acids and mechanistic analysis of nitrogenase. In addition to the oral presentations, the symposium featured a poster session with more than 30 poster presentations.  

The symposium was planned and hosted by five current CBITG trainees, including Sara Coulup and Carter Eiden from Medicinal Chemistry; Matthew Jensen and Tory Schaaf from Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics; and Clifford Gee from Chemistry.  

The symposium was funded through contributions from the Departments of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, Chemistry, and Medicinal Chemistry, the Chemical Biology Initiative, the Biotechnology Institute, and the colleges of the colleges of Biological Science, Science and Engineering, and Pharmacy.

The mission of the CBITG is to provide students with interdisciplinary training so that they can tackle complex research problems involving a combination of chemical and biological methods. Professor Mark Distefano from the Department of Chemistry is director.