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A year ago, in January, when John Mascola heard that a new coronavirus had been detected in an animal market in Wuhan, China, he left everything at his desk on the fourth floor of the US government’s Vaccine Research Center and walked up one flight of stairs to the office of a longtime colleague, Nicole Doria-Rose. Felicitously, Mascola, who is the center’s director, had been working on ways to immunize people against coronaviruses. A vaccine against this new bug, soon to be known as SARS-CoV-2, was the first priority, the only surefire way of halting the growing pandemic. Mascola and Doria-Rose, an immunologist, go way back. And they hoped there was another approach that might also contribute to the cause, one they’d been chasing for more than a decade. They wanted to find a monoclonal antibody.
January 27, 2021 |
Erica L.-W. Majumder joined the UW–Madison faculty in January 2021 as an assistant professor in the Department of Bacteriology.
What is your hometown? Where did you grow up?
I’m from St. Louis, Missouri, and happy to be back in the Midwest.
What is your educational/professional background, including your previous position?
I’m a chemist by training and throughout my training and career have become more and more enamored with the chemistry that microorganisms do and produce. I did my undergraduate at a liberal arts college called Drury University and studied chemistry, math, physics and Spanish. What I liked most was that everyone had to minor in Global Studies which encouraged me to think about the societal and philosophical implications of the scientific work I do. I earned my Ph.D. in bioinorganic chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) working with Bob Blankenship on mechanisms of energy conversion and conservation in photosynthesis.
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Credit: BBVA Foundation
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine has gone in this thirteenth edition to David Julius, from the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, from the Scripps Institute, La Jolla (United States), for identifying the receptors that enable us to sense temperature, pain and pressure. Temperature, pain and pressure are part of our sense of touch, perhaps the least understood of the five main senses of humans, read the opening words of the citation. Julius and Patapoutian provided a molecular and neural basis for thermosensation and mechanosensation.
This line of research holds out exciting medical possibilities, because it sheds light on how to reduce chronic and acute pain associated with a range of diseases, trauma and their treatments. In fact, several pharmaceutical laboratories are working to identify molecules that act on these receptors with the aim of treating different fo
CDC researchers back U.S. school re-openings but with strict COVID-19 regulations
The global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to unfold. Since its causative virus – severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) – was first detected in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, it has spread to over 191 countries and territories. So far, over 100 million cases have been reported, and 2.1 million have lost their lives. In the U.S., the numbers are especially sobering; to date, 25.5 million have been infected and over 425,500 have died.
As the U.S. continues to grapple with surging cases and the complex logistics of mass vaccination, is the country in a position to fully re-open its schools for in-person learning? Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) think so – notwithstanding a few very important caveats.