A Nobel laureate medical researcher will speak at the Wayne State University School of Medicine on March 18 during the first Bhanu P. Jena Endowed Distinguished Lecture.

Joachim Frank, Ph.D., professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University, will present “Structural biology meets cell biology – life and disease processes studied by cryo-EM” at 2:30 p.m. in the Margherio Family Conference Center in Scott Hall.

Dr. Frank shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution,” with Richard Henderson, Ph.D., of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, and Jacques Dubochet, emeritus professor of Biophysics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Between 1975 and 1986, according to the Nobel committee, Dr. Frank developed a method for analyzing and merging blurry two-dimensional images from electron microscopes into crisp three-dimensional images.

His lab investigates the mechanism of translation on the ribosome by using cryo-electron microscopy and single-particle reconstruction to reveal the dynamics of decoding and translocation mechanisms. The method involves cryo-electron microscopy, forming a three-dimensional image by combining thousands of projections of molecules embedded in a thin layer of ice. Pioneered in his lab, the method is now widely used to study macromolecular interactions.

The Bhanu P. Jena Endowed Distinguished Lecture in Cell Physiology was established in honor of the pioneering and exemplary scientific and academic contributions of Bhanu Jena, Ph.D., the George E. Palade University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Physiology at the WSU School of Medicine.