Resources to Enable
A Structural View of Biology
December 15, 2011, 6-8 pm

In the new Center for Integrative Proteomics Research Building
(next to the CABM - Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine)
Rutgers/UMDNJ Busch Campus
679 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ
Parking Pass is not Required for this Program
Click Here for Directions   http://deposit.rcsb.org/directions/directions-cipr.html
Please Scroll Down to Register for this Free Program or visit www.awisnj.org

Helen Berman, Director of the RCSB* Protein Data Bank and the Structural Biology Knowledgebase (SBKB) will provide an overview of powerful resources that are free to researchers and students worldwide. The Protein Data Bank, which is celebrating its 40th year, provides access to experimentally-determined 3D structures of proteins and nucleic acids. The SBKB integrates the results of structural biology and genomics efforts with other biological information, while highlighting the latest research and technology advances.

Dr. Helen Berman, Protein Data Bank Director
Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

AWISNJ provides programs, scholarships, networking opportunities, and support for women in all areas of STEM-–science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Committees are growing to address social networking, program development, and outreach. Want to get involved? Visit www.awisnj.org or contact Joanne Gere, President, at 609-203-6852 or jgere@biosciencecollaborative.com

*Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB) consortium

Dr. Berman's Biography-

HELEN M. BERMAN received her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1967 after 3 years from the University of Pittsburgh under the direction of George Alan Jeffrey, and stayed on for postdoctoral training as a National Institutes of Health Trainee. She then joined the Fox Chase Cancer Center in 1969, and spent the next 20 years developing her own research program that focused on nucleic acid crystallography and the interactions between nucleic acids and drugs.

In 1989, she joined the faculty at Rutgers, The State University in New Brunswick, NJ, where she is now a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.  At Rutgers, she expanded her crystallographic program to the study of proteins, including the structures of collagen, protein-nucleic acid interactions, and binary and ternary complexes with catabolite activating protein (CAP), while at the same time developing structural databases and ontologies.

As head of the Research Collaboratory (RCSB), Berman became the Director of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) in 1998, and was a founding member of the Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) collaboration in 2003.  The wwPDB supports scientific research and education by providing the essential PDB archive of information about the experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies to the global community.

Other biological data management projects include EMDataBank.org, a global deposition and retrieval network for cryo electron microscopy map, model and associated metadata, and the Structural Biology Knowledgebase, an online resource that combines the products of Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) research with biological data from over 150 annotation resources to give comprehensive information about proteins.

In parallel to her research, Berman is extremely active in the community, and serves a variety of committees and professional societies. She was president of the American Crystallographic Association (ACA), on the Study Section for the National Institutes of Health, and on an advisory panel for the biological directorate at the NSF.  Berman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Biophysical Society, from which she received the Distinguished Service Award in 2000.  She is a recipient of the ACA’s Buerger Award (2006) and the University of Pittsburgh's 2010 Department of Chemistry Alumni Award, and a Distinguished Lecturer for Sigma Xi (2007 - 2009).