(Posted March 31, 2008)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Judith Klinman, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, will be in residence at Juniata College from Monday, March 31 through Wednesday, April 2 and will give three talks during that time.

All of Klinman's lectures are free and open to the public.

On Monday, March 31, she will lecture on "Enzyme Catalysis: View from the 'Classics'" at 8 p.m. in Alumni Hall in Brumbaugh Academic Center.

On Tuesday, April 1, she will give a talk about "Quantum Hydrogen Transfer: Linking Protein Dynamics to Catalysis" at 5:30 p.m. in Alumni Hall.

She will finish her lecture schedule Wednesday, April 2 with the talk, "Life as Aerobes: Outsmarting the Toxicity of O2" at noon in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig Center for Science.

Klinman's research is concerned with the nature of enzyme catalysis, the process that allows substances to be created and digested by organisms. She has discovered new ways that enzymes can work and new ways that partner chemicals can find their way into the active site. She has also pioneered studies into how organisms can survive in a toxic oxygen atmosphere.

Klinman earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962 from the University of Pennsylvania and went on to earn a doctorate in organic chemistry in 1966, also from Penn. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth, Israel from 1966 to 1967.

She moved to the Institute of Cancer Research in Philadelphia, Pa. from 1970 to 1978. In 1974, she returned to the University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor of biophysics and left in 1978 to accept a position as associate professor of chemistry at Berkeley. She has been chair of the chemistry department since 2000.

She is a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.