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Sir Philip Cohen to Deliver Keynote MRC Lecture
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Phillip Cohen |
On Wednesday, March 10, 8:00 AM–9:00 AM in Ballroom A, Salt Place Convention Center, Professor Sir Phillip Cohen will deliver the Keynote Medical Research Council (MRC) Lecture, “The Interplay Between Phosphorylation and Ubiquitination in Regulating the Innate Immune System.” Dr. Cohen is the founder and Co-Director of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT), the UK’s largest collaboration between a basic research institution and the pharmaceutical industry. DSTT is widely regarded as a model for how industry and academia should interact, for which it received a Queen’s Anniversary Award for Higher Education in 2006.
For the past 40 years, Dr. Cohen’s research has been devoted to studying the role of protein phosphorylation in cell regulation and human disease, a process that controls almost all aspects of cell life. His contributions to this area include working out over a 25-year period how calmodulin, the calcium-binding protein, is involved in the insulin-induced stimulation of glycogen metabolism in muscle. Currently, his laboratory is working on the signaling pathways that regulate the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines and interferons during bacterial and viral infection, research that is aimed at understanding how the uncontrolled production of these substances causes chronic inflammatory diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, and septic shock.
He received his B.Sc. (1966) and Ph.D. (1969) from the University College London and spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA) with Edmond Fischer the 1992 Nobel Laureate for Medicine or Physiology. In 1971, Dr. Cohen returned to the UK to become a faculty member at the University of Dundee, Scotland, where he has worked ever since. He has been a Royal Society Research Professor since 1984, Director of the MRC Protein Phosphorylation Unit since its inception in 1990, and was the Honorary President of the British Biochemical Society from 2006–2008. He was knighted in 1998. Dr. Cohen has been awarded a 2010 Honorary Membership in SOT.
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