Inaugural Simpson Memorial Lecture on 17 April

4 April 2006—Gary Felsenfeld, chief of the Physical Chemistry section and the Molecular Biology Laboratories at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will present the inaugural Robert T. Simpson Memorial Lecture in Molecular Medicine at 5:00 p.m. on Monday, 17 April, in the Berg Auditorium, 100 Life Sciences Building, on the University Park campus. This free public lecture, titled "Chromatin Boundaries, Chromatin Domains, and Epigenetic Mechanisms," is sponsored by the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Felsenfeld's research concerns the nuclear factors that regulate gene expression during the development of animal cells. His work includes consideration of an essential role for chromatin in mediating gene transcription and the use of globin genes as a model system for understanding how transcriptionally "open" complexes are stabilized.

A 1951 graduate of Harvard University, Felsenfeld earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1955. He has been chief of Physical Chemistry and the NIH Molecular Biology Laboratories since 1961. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of its Biology Division. He presented the 1992 Pollard Lecture at Penn State and was the Keynote Speaker at Penn State's Summer Symposium in Molecular Biology in 1995.

The Simpson Memorial Lectureship honors Robert T. Simpson, formerly the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Molecular Biology, and is made possible through donations from his family, friends, and colleagues. For more than 35 years, Simpson was an international leader in research on chromatin-a fundamental component of chromosomes-and its role in gene regulation. He was at the National Institutes of Health from 1970 until 1995, when he came to Penn State. His addition to the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is considered to have contributed substantially to placing Penn State, and the department, at the forefront of chromatin research, and to have greatly enhanced Penn State's research and educational missions.

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