Olivia DrakeOn the morning of June 22, Matt Donahue '14 and and Pik-Tone Fung '14 learned that a Wesleyan chemistry professor had been shot in the basement of Hall-Atwater Laboratory. Public Safety taped off the area around Room 078 and removed the body, leaving behind a blood-stained lab coat, a gun, two shell casings, a hand-written note from "Greg Mulligan," a bloody bullet and an overturned chair. Small pools of blood collected under the victim and blood droplets freckled the nearby lab cabinets and counter. The professor did owe $20,000 to Greg Mulligan. Was he murdered for not returning the money?…
Q: Professor Pringle, you joined Wesleyan's Chemistry Department as an assistant professor in 1968. How have times changed? A: I started here before there were female students. Wesleyan had NO COMPUTER at all, and Ph.D. programs were just starting. At the time, we had 11 faculty in the department: Al Fry, Gill Burford, John Sease, Jose Gomez-Ibanez, Peter Leermakers, Julia Tan, Don Sebera and Larry Faller were here, and two faculty came here when I did--Paul Haake from UCLA and Peter Wharton from Wisconsin. Of this group, Al Fry is the only one still working in the department. The department…
During extended space travel, astronauts may experience dramatic health consequences, such as anemia, due to reduced gravity and exposure to space radiation. To help combat the adverse effects of space ailments, two scientists at Wesleyan are developing new molecules that enhance cells' ability to tolerate large swings in pressure, fluid redistribution, temperature and radiation exposure. Christina Othon, assistant professor of physics, and Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies, received a $20,000 seed grant from NASA's Biological and Physical Research Enterprise to work on the project titled "Osmoregulation for Microgravity Environments." The scientists are taking inspiration from…
Philip Bolton, professor of chemistry; Dobroslawa Bialonska, postdoctoral fellow in in chemistry; and chemistry graduate student Kenneth Song are the co-authors of "Complexes of mismatched and complementary DNA with minor groove binders. Structures at nucleotide resolution via an improved hydroxyl radical cleavage methodology," published in Mutation Research, 726(1): pages 47-53, 2011. In this paper, the authors explain how they've developed a protocol to investigate the structures of the complexes of damaged DNA with drug like molecules. Tumor cell lines can replicate faster than normal cells and many also have defective DNA repair pathways. This has lead to the investigation of the inhibition of…
Paul Karl Haake, professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, emeritus, died on Dec. 3 in Middletown, Conn. He was 79 years old. A memorial service was held Dec. 7 at the Wasch Center for Retired Faculty. In the true spirit of the liberal arts and the Wesleyan tradition of service, Professor Haake was particularly proud of the popularcourses he taught to students outside the sciences and of his participation in community issues. In 1975, Governor Grasso appointed Professor Haake to the Connecticut’s Nuclear Power Evaluation Council, a commission concerned with the safety of nuclear power. Professor Haake completed his A.B.…
Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies, is the co-author of "Lipopolysaccharide Biosynthesis without the Lipids: Recognition Promiscuity of Escherichia coli, Heptosyltransferase I," published by the American Chemical Society in Nov. 2011. The abstract is available here.
Stewart Novick, professor of chemistry, received a grant worth $43,260 from the National Science Foundation. The award is shared with Professor Stephen Cooke of SUNY-Purchase and represents a new collaboration between Professors Cooke and Novick who now co-mentor graduate students and share sophisticated equipment (Fourier transform microwave spectrometers housed in Novick's lab at Wesleyan). The collaboration, which goes beyond this one grant, involves investigating the structures and dynamics of a whole range of systems including large halogenated compounds and molecules involving actinide valence electrons in their chemical bonding.
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Manju Hingorani, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, co-authored a study titled "hMSH2 controls ATP processing by hMSH2-hMSH6," published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on Sept. 19. The abstract is online here. Hingorani co-authored another study with David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, professor of chemistry, titled "Allosterism in Muts Proteins: How DNA Mismatch Recognition Signals Repair." The study was published in the Biophysical Journal in 2011. The abstract is online here.
Eric GershonBrian Northrop, assistant professor of chemistry, has published “Substituent Effects on the Reversibility of Furan-Maleimide Cycloadditions” in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. His co-author is Robert Boutelle, a 2011 Wesleyan graduate who is now a graduate student at UCLA. The paper is online here.
Philip Bolton, professor of chemistry, has published “Complexes of mismatched and complementary DNA with minor groove binders: Structures at nucleotide resolution via an improved hydroxyl radical cleavage methodology” in Mutation Research, 2011. The article is online here.
David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, professor of chemistry, was on sabbatical last spring at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in New Delhi, India. He was visiting and working on research projects with Professor B. Jayaram, director of the Supercomputer Center for Bioinformatics, SCFBIO. Beveridge's former student, Becky Lee '10, was spending a year doing research in Jayaram's SCFBIO research group on a project in computational biophysics. Beveridge presented one of the thematic lectures on "Dynamic Allosterism" in a lecture series celebrating the 50th anniversary of IIT-Delhi.