Seminar: Fusion Mechanisms in Viral Entry

Speaker: Stephen Harrison　Ph.D.
Director, Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics, Harvard Medical School, Boston
Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA

Time: 2:00 p.m., May 14th, 2007 (Monday)

Venue: Conference Room, 4th Floor
Institut Pasteur of Shanghai, CAS
411 Hefei Road
(Near South Chongqing Road)

Encl: Short introduction of Prof. S. Harisson
Speaker Introduction: Stephen C. Harrison is Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and of Pediatrics, Harvard Medical School, and Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He obtained his B.A. from Harvard in 1963 and his Ph.D. (Biophysics) from Harvard in 1968. He has served on the Harvard faculty since 1971. Between 1972 and 1996, he was Chair of the Board of Tutors in biochemical Sciences, Harvard’s undergraduate program in biochemistry; he was Chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (Faculty of Arts & Sciences) from 1988-1992. For many years, his research laboratory was linked closely with that of the late Don C. Wiley.

Harrison has made important contributions to structural biology, most notably by determining and analyzing the structures of viruses and viral proteins, by crystallographic analysis of protein/DNA complexes, and by structural studies of protein-kinase switching mechanisms. The initiator of high-resolution virus crystallography, he has moved from his early work on tomato bushy stunt virus (1978) to the study of more complex human pathogens, including the capsid of human papillomavirus, the envelope of dengue virus, and several components of HIV. He has also turned some his research attention to even more complex assemblies, such as clathrin coated vesicles.

Dr. Harrison is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a foreign member of EMBO. He received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (with Don Wiley and Michael Rossmann) in 1990, the ICN International Prize in Virology in 1998 and the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (with Michael Rossmann) in 2001.