The Department of Biochemistry's weekly BCH 252 seminar series is presented this week by

Dr. Elsa Garcin, Professor, Adjunct Associate Professor at UMBC, IGS Information Genomique et Structurale, Aix-Marseille Université 

Seminar Title: "Structural studies of giant virus proteins"

Biography: Elsa Garcin is a French biochemist who has spent most of her career in the US. After an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry (Aix-Marseille University, France), she obtained her PhD in Physics at the University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble (France) in 1998. In 1999, she joined the labs of Profs Elizabeth Getzoff and John Tainer at the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, CA) where she did her postdoctoral studies on Structural studies of Nitric Oxide Synthases. In 2008, she joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UMBC (Baltimore) as an assistant professor. She became a tenured associate professor in 2015. As an independent researcher, her research was focused on enzymes involved in the nitric oxide pathway: soluble guanylyl cyclase, glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase, and SIRP-alpha. In 2018, she was invited to join the Laboratoire d’Information Génomique et Structurale in Marseille (France), led by Dr. Chantal Abergel, for a one-year sabbatical. In 2020, she was awarded an A*MIDEX Excellence Chair to study new metabolic pathways in giant viruses. She is currently a professor at Aix-Marseille University where she teaches Biochemistry, and an adjunct Associate Professor at UMBC.

Faculty Host: Dr. Jeff Perry, jeff.perry@ucr.edu