National leader in NMR spectroscopy is featured speaker at SUNY ESF, SU symposium

Wednesday, October 2, 2002, By News Staff

National leader in NMR spectroscopy is featured speaker at SUNY ESF, SU symposiumOctober 02, 2002Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Ad Bax, a nationally known pioneer in the field of NMR spectroscopy, will be the featured speaker at the Fourth Annual Upstate New York Symposium on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance on Oct. 14 on the SUNY ESF campus. Researchers from SUNY ESF, Syracuse University, SUNY Upstate Medical University and Bristol-Myers Squibb are hosting the symposium, which is free and open to interested participants.

The registration deadline is Oct. 9. Registration information and a complete schedule of events can be found on the Web at www.esf.edu/unynmr.

About 100 scientists from New York State, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Quebec and Ontario are expected to attend the symposium. Many will be participating through discussions and posters.

Bax, chief of biophysical NMR spectroscopy for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, M.D., will present “Weak alignment offers new NMR opportunities in NMR structure determination” at 4:30 p.m. in Baker Lab, Room 140. Bax has been the driving force behind a revolutionary use of NMR to reveal the structure of proteins. He and his research group were the first to successfully use NMR to study the structure of such large proteins as interferon. He has been the number one cited chemist since 1981-four of his papers, published between 1981 and 1990, have been cited more than 1,000 times.

Born in the Netherlands, Bax attended Delft University of Technology, where he studied applied physics and concentrated on the design and development of control software for a new generation of NMR spectrometer. He earned a Ph.D. in 1981 from Delft while doing most of his work at Oxford University in the laboratory of Ray Freeman. He spent two years as a post-doc at Colorado State University before moving to the NIH in 1983.

Bax was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences and has received numerous awards and honors, including the American Chemical Society, Maryland Chapter, Remsen Award (2001), the Hillebrand Award of the American Chemical Society (1999), the Gold Medal of the Royal Dutch Chemical Society (1992) and the NIH Directors Award (1992), among others.