David L. Weaver Lectures in Biophysics and Computational Biology
David L. Weaver
Through a generous donation in December 2006, Elena B. Weaver and her sons, Timothy D. Weaver, Christopher P. Weaver, and Ash P. Weaver endowed the David L. Weaver Lectures in Biophysics and Computational Biology in the College of Biological Sciences. The series honors the memory of a husband and father, David L. Weaver, who was a prominent biophysics researcher and professor at Tufts University.
As an active researcher, Dr. Weaver was impressed with the research and faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center. He planned to spend his sabbatical year, 2006-2007, working at the Genome Center with Professor Yong Duan, conducting research in protein folding. When Dr. Weaver suddenly passed away before his sabbatical began, his wife and children wanted to ensure that the UC Davis scientific community could benefit from his knowledge and passion for research, and they created this endowed lectureship. Read more about Dr. Weaver in the CBS Winter/Spring 2007 Newsletter (PDF file).
Lectures Past and Future
2008: April 28, Monday -- Christopher Dobson FRS, John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology at Cambridge University, England, will speak on "Life on the Edge: The Nature and Origins of Protein Misfolding Diseases." The talk will take place at 3:00 p.m. in room 1005, Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility. The ability of proteins to fold up in a precise way allows them to take on a vast range of functions. But when folding goes wrong, serious problems can occur -- such as the formation of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's Disease, "mad cow" disease and related conditions. Dobson will draw together recent work showing a narrow boundary between normal and aberrant behavior, and how this sheds light on the origin, spread and possible prevention of these diseases. More about this lecture is on page 9 of the CBS Summer 2008 newsletter.
2007: The first lecture in the series was given by Dr. Martin Karplus of Harvard University who was Dr. Weaver’s research collaborator and friend for over 30 years. Karplus has been the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry at Harvard since 1979, and is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory of CNRS and Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France. His lecture was held on April 27th, 2007 in the Genome and Biomedical Science Facility Auditorium. The lecture topic was "How Proteins Work: Insights from Simulations.
Dr. Dirk Laukien of Bruker Optics opened the inaugural lecture with a talk about Dr. Weaver's research at Bruker Optics, titled "Unfolding David Weaver's Contributions at Bruker Optics."