3/18/2011 Celia Elliott
Jeehae Park, a graduate student in Taekjip Ha's research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been selected to participate in the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany in June.
Written by Celia Elliott
Jeehae Park, a graduate student in Taekjip Ha's research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been selected to participate in the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany in June. Twenty-five Nobel laureates are expected for this year’s meeting, along with 550 young researchers from 70 countries.
“My goals for the Lindau meeting are to broaden my perspectives on cutting-edge problems in biology,” said Park. “The meeting will provide an extraordinary opportunity for me to network with top-notch researchers in diverse specialties from all around the world.”
Held every year since 1951, the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings provide a forum for Nobel Prize winners and young scientists from around the world to exchange ideas, discuss future projects, and build international relationships. The 2011 Lindau Meeting will focus on current problems in physiology and medicine, although laureates from all Nobel fields of science will participate. A separate Lindau meeting is held for economists.
Park, who works with the Ha group in the Center for the Physics of Living Cells at the University of Illinois, investigates the nanometer-scale dynamics of biomolecules as a means to understand their physiological functions.
In research published in Cell in August 2010, Park and her collaborators used a single-molecule fluorescence imaging technique, to study helicases—enzymes that regulate the replication and repair of DNA. They showed that a bacterial helicase, PcrA, prevents unwanted recombination of DNA strands by reeling in the DNA one base pair at a time, in the process stripping off renegade proteins.
Park graduated from Yonsei University (Seoul, Korea) in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in bioengineering. She is currently a PhD student in biophysics and computational biology, in the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, at the University of Illinois. Park was a finalist in the Proctor & Gamble Company Graduate Student Research Award competition in 2010, and she received the prestigious “Doctoral Study Abroad Fellowship” from the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS) in 2004. The KFAS award is presented to only one or two students in each field of study in Korea per year.