Colorado State University Professor Karolin Luger Appointed to National Institute of General Medical Sciences Advisory Council

Note to Reporters: A photo of Karolin Luger is available with the news release at http://www.news.colostate.edu/.

Karolin Luger, a Colorado State University Distinguished Professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, recently was appointed to serve on the advisory council for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Luger, one of four newly appointed members, will serve a four-year term performing the second level of peer review for research and research training grant applications assigned to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Luger is one of only a dozen University Distinguished Professors at Colorado State and the university’s only Howard Hughes Medical Investigator, a nationally prestigious honor from one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research.

In her new role on the National Institute of General Medical Sciences advisory council, Luger will offer advice and recommendations on policy and program development, program implementation and evaluation. The council is composed of leaders in the biological and medical sciences, education, health care and public affairs.

Luger joined Colorado State in 1999 and is one of the world’s foremost authorities in nucleosome structure, which is the basic unit for compacting DNA. Her research focuses on the structure and function of eukaryotic chromatin. She led an extraordinary scientific breakthrough that effectively solved the three-dimensional structure of the nucleosome. The nucleosome is a spool-like basic building block of chromatin, the material in which possibly billions of DNA base pairs are compacted in an individual cell nucleus. This work is now cited in nearly every modern textbook of biochemistry and molecular biology.

The National Institute of General Medical Services was established in 1962 and is one of the National Institutes of Health, the principal medical research agency of the federal government. Scientists supported by the National Institutes of Health make many advances in understanding fundamental life processes and increase knowledge about the mechanisms and pathways involved in certain diseases.

The National Institutes of Health is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which supports foundational research in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

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