Tom Cech, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry and a longtime mentor to UMBC students, headlines the 12th annual "A Look Ahead" life sciences symposium from 3:30 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 12 in the Engineering and Computer Science building atrium and Lecture Hall 5.
Cech, who recently stepped down from leading the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder to return to teaching, will give a lecture titled "Crawling out of the RNA World" at the event. Since 1994, Cech has mentored 20 UMBC Meyerhoff Scholars during summer internships at his lab.
Cech is joined at "A Look Ahead" by fellow esteemed scientist and speaker George Georgiou, professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin, who will give The Janice Antoine Lumpkin Memorial Lecture, to be titled "Engineering the Next Generation of Protein Therapeutics."
"A Look Ahead" is UMBC's premiere life sciences symposium, drawing several hundred students, scientists, educators and biotechnology business leaders annually to network, present research and learn from other members of Maryland's bioscience community.