The Wayne State University School of Medicine Department of Physiology will present the Walter H. Seegers Endowed Symposium on March 26.

The symposium presentations will take place from noon to 4:30 p.m. in the Green Lecture Hall of Scott Hall. A reception, student poster session and dinner will follow beginning at 5 p.m.

Guest speakers will include:

Jacob Estes, Ph.D., professor and chief of Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University. He will present “Finding and Characterizing HIV’s Hiding Places.”

Mark Kaplan, Ph.D., the Billie Lou Wood Professor of Pediatrics in the Department of Cell Biology at Indiana University. He will present “Allergic Inflammation in Your Biggest Organ.”

Sidney Whiteheart, Ph.D., professor of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the University of Kentucky. He will present “Platelet Cell Biology in Hemostasis and Beyond.”

John Schuetz, Ph.D., vice chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Dr. Schuetz’s topic has not yet been announced.

The symposium is named for Walter Seegers, Ph.D., who served as chair of the WSU Department of Physiology from 1946 to 1980, when he retired. In additional to his lifelong work with prothrombin, Dr. Seegers identified the biological activities of many other coagulation factors. Together with his colleagues in the department, he initiated an annual series of Blood Symposiums that were held in Detroit. The symposiums were the predecessors of the American Heart Association Council on Thrombosis symposiums and preceded the International Society on Thrombosis and Hemostasis bi-annual meetings by 15 years.

Dr. Seegers was among the first to recognize the importance of the blood platelet to coagulation and, together with Shirley Johnson, convened the first meeting on platelets held at Henry Ford Hospital in 1960. He received one of the first federal grants at Wayne State University, from the then National Heart Institute. He was also named to one of the first endowed chairs at the university, the William D. Traitel Professor of Hematology, in 1964.

Please RSVP by March 10 to Christine Cupps at ccupps@med.wayne.edu.