Last updated February 5, 2024
The 7th Penn State Bioinorganic Workshop
will be tentatively offered May 28 – June 4, 2026
Further updates will be provided on this website
The area of Bioinorganic Chemistry is prominently featured at the Pennsylvania State University. The groups of Amie Boal, Marty Bollinger, Squire Booker, Don Bryant, Joseph Cotruvo, John Golbeck, Carsten Krebs, Alexey Silakov, and Emily Weinert work actively in this area. In addition, the bioinorganic community at Penn State hosts two recurring events. In general, these events begin shortly after Memorial Day and run until the weekend approx 11-12 days after Memorial Day.
1) Frontiers in Metallobiochemistry Symposia
The Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Pennsylvania State University hosts every year the “Summer Symposium in Molecular Biology”. Each year, a program is developed relative to current research directions in the medical and molecular biological sciences. Because the research area of bioinorganic chemistry is strongly represented at Penn State, the bioinorganic group has been allowed to host this meeting every four years. The symposia hosted by the bioinorganic group have been termed “Frontiers in Metallobiochemistry” and have been offered since 2006. The two final public lectures of the 2010 workshop were given by Profs. Steve Lippard (MIT) and Harry Gray (Caltech) and have been recorded and can be streamed. The Frontiers on Metallobiochemistry symposia typically feature ~20-25 faculty talks and ~10 student/postdoc talks, as well as two 2-h poster sessions with ~100 posters.
2) Bioinorganic Workshops
Bioinorganic chemistry is a vibrant field that encompasses a wide variety of scientific areas (e.g. genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, and analytical and physical chemistry) and an even wider assortment of methods to interrogate given questions (e.g. reaction kinetics, many spectroscopies, X-ray crystallography, and computation). Among its aims is to understand the formation, function, and regulation of the many metallo-cofactors found in Nature as well as to identify novel metallo-cofactors. Because these areas are so diverse and require in-depth expertise, research in bioinorganic chemistry is most often carried out collaboratively.
The bioinorganic workshops at the University of Georgia and the University of Louvain-la-Neuve
In order to provide training to students and postdocs working in such a broad area, workshops in bioinorganic chemistry were offered from ~1985 to ~2003 at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (organized by Bob Crichton and colleagues) and from ~1990 to ~2000 at the University of Georgia (organized by Michael Johnson and colleagues). These workshops were offered during the summer to ~60-80 students and postdoctoral associates and were divided into three separate parts: (i) ~20-25 tutorials given by experts in the field on a subject pertaining to bioinorganic chemistry, (ii) three one-day practical sessions, during which workshop participants carried out experiments on three of five different topics, and (iii) case studies, presented by experts in that particular field, illustrating the interdisciplinary approach in bioinorganic chemistry. Both workshops were very popular with students and faculty, as they provided an unparalleled training opportunity.
The bioinorganic workshops at Penn State
Since 2010 the bioinorganic community at Penn State organizes bioinorganic workshops every other year. These events allow graduate students and post-docs to learn the numerous techniques used to carry out research within this field. The 2010 Bioinorganic Workshop was a 2-day pilot event that provided training in four methods to 36 participants offered by the Bollinger/Krebs group. Since 2012, the workshops were significantly longer (~8-9 days) and had many more participants [up to ~160 total; ~45 from PSU, ~100 from other domestic institutions, and ~20 international visitors]. These three workshops featured three distinct sections. (i) ~16 talks by faculty experts on methods used in the field (since 2014, the talks have been recorded and can be streamed), (ii) hands on training in ~20 methods in the lab in small groups of typically no more than 6 participants, and (iii) presentation of the participants’ research via poster sessions and several lectures selected from abstracts (the oral presentations are part of the Frontiers in Metallobiochemistry symposia when these are offered).