Dartmouth presidential lecturer examines today's revolution in Life Sciences

Posted 04/05/98

Dartmouth Medical School professor William Wickner will deliver the college's 11th annual Presidential Lecture on Wednesday, Feb. 18 at 4 p.m. He will speak on "Understanding Our Cells, Rethinking Ourselves" in Alumni Hall of the Hopkins Center. A reception will follow in the Top of the Hop. The address is free and open to the public.

Wickner, the James C. Chilcott '20 Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and chair of the biochemistry department at Dartmouth Medical School, joined the faculty in 1993. An expert in the field of membrane assembly and organelle inheritance, his work has been published in Cell, Science, Nature, and other leading journals. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale University, Wickner holds an M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He has been honored with a Mellon Fellowship (1974-76), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982-83) and an NIH Merit Award (1988). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wickner's lecture will address how the advances in chemistry and physics during the last century have transformed our everyday lives and provided tools for the life sciences. This has allowed the previously separate disciplines of biochemistry, pharmacology, genetics, and informatics to merge and has led to a flowering of the life sciences.

The Presidential Lecture Series was established in the fall of 1987 to recognize the contributions of outstanding members of the Dartmouth faculty. Dartmouth President James O. Freedman, who initiated the lecture series, invites each lecturer to share something of "the intellectual work animating his or her research and teaching."

Previous Presidential Lecturers have included chemistry professor Walter Stockmayer, drama professor Errol Hill and history professor Mary Kelley.