Colorado State University’s Karolin Luger Selected as Biophysical Society National Lecturer

Note to Reporters: To watch a brief video on Karolin Luger’s research on YouTube, go to http://youtu.be/3kcXCB5xUCs. Photos are available with the news release at http://www.news.colostate.edu.

Karolin Luger, University Distinguished Professor and Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Colorado State University, can add another award to her list of accomplishments: National Lecturer for the Biophysical Society, which is one of its most prestigious honors.

The honor of National Lecturer is given to an outstanding biophysicist selected by the society president. The recipient presents the National Lecture during the Biophysical Society’s 57th annual meeting in February, which draws more than 6,000 scientists from around the world.

Luger told the Biophysical Society newsletter that she is so thrilled by the honor that she is “tempted to take a picture of the audience from the podium,” she said. “I think this will be the largest number of biophysicists in one room I’ll ever see!”

She joined Colorado State in 1999 and is one of the world’s foremost authorities in nucleosome structure, which is the basic unit for compacting the human genome. Her research focuses on the structure, function and assembly of the nucleosome, using a wide variety of biophysical approaches. Her work is now cited in nearly every modern textbook of biochemistry and molecular biology.

Luger is in her last year of a four-year term as a member of the advisory council for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health. She helps perform 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 15 University Distinguished Professors at Colorado State and the university’s only Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a nationally prestigious honor from one of the largest private funding organizations for biological and medical research.

To read the full interview with Luger in the Biophysical Society newsletter, go to http://col.st/X86Yig.

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