50 Years of
Smith College
Biochemistry
1957-2007
Today’s events have been generously supported by the President of
Smith College, the Smith College Lecture Committee, the Center
for Molecular Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Grant to Smith College.
Front Cover Photographs:
Chemical Laboratory, Smith College 1915, Stoddard Hall
Photographer/creater: Katherine McClellan. Copyright:Smith College.
Chemistry laboratory, Smith College 1949-50.
Photographer/creater: Louis B. Schlivek. Copyright:Louis B. Schlivek
Biochemistry Laboratory, Smith College 2006.
Photographer/creater: College Relations. Copyright: Smith College
Back Cover Photographs:
Students in laboratories and Center for Molecular Biology, Smith
College 2006.
Photographer/creater: Dick Fish. Copyright: Smith College
Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Smith College
Biochemistry Program
“50 Years of Smith Biochemists”
12:10-1:00 McConnell 103
A panel with five alumnae discussing their current research, how
their Smith education charted their career, and what they see as
the exciting developments in biochemistry. Lunch and drinks will
be provided.
“From Smith to a Life in Science”
3:00-4:00 Neilson Browsing Room
Teatime with our alumnae panelists, discussing issues of
importance to women in science. Hosted by the Biochemistry
majors.
Birthday Celebration for Biochemistry
4:00-4:30 McConnell Foyer
What would a birthday be without cake? Research posters from
our Biochemistry students will be on display and the Biochemistry
majors will receive their graduation stoles celebrating the 50th
anniversary.
“Cellular Nutrient Homeostasis”
4:30-5:30 McConnell 103
Keynote seminar by Erin O’Shea, Professor of Molecular and
Cellular Biology and Director of the FAS Center for Systems
Biology at Harvard University.
Biochemistry at Smith College: A Short History
Although the spring of 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the
Program in Biochemistry at Smith College, the teaching of biochemistry
dates back to the earliest days of the institution. Just one year after the
College was founded in 1876, Bessie Talbot Capen, one of the earliest
women graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was
hired to teach chemistry and botany. In 1880, she left to establish her
own preparatory school for girls in Northampton, encouraged by
President Seelye, who correctly envisioned an important role for Miss
Capen's school in the training of future Smith College students. John
Tappan Stoddard then took over instruction in chemistry; his leadership
in the emerging department lasted for nearly four decades, from 1880
until 1919. During the early years, all Smith College classes met in the
Main Building, now College Hall. In 1887 the sciences moved to the
newly built Lilly Hall, and in 1898 chemistry moved to its own building,
Chemistry Hall, renamed Stoddard Hall after Stoddard’s death. Burton
Hall was built later, in 1914, and eventually housed the departments of
Botany, Zoology and Bacteriology and Public Health.
During Stoddard's time, the chemistry department grew both in the
size of its faculty and in the breadth of its offerings. In 1908, Mary
Louise Foster (Smith College Class of 1891; AM, Smith College, 1912;
PhD University of Chicago, 1914) joined the department, and in the
years that followed, played a major role in introducing the field of
biochemistry to the curriculum. She offered the first biochemistry
course (Chemistry 32) during 1916-17, and with the exception of the
semesters she was on sabbatical leave, taught this and other biochemistry
courses until her retirement in 1933. Mary Louise Foster was also
actively involved with the formation of the first interdepartmental majors
at the College in 1925-26 and later wrote on the significance of
interdisciplinary studies in undergraduate education. The four
interdepartmental majors listed in the 51st year Catalogue of Smith
College (1925-1926) were all within the sciences: Premedical, Public
Health, Bacteriology and Biochemistry-Zoology.
In the following decades, interdepartmental major offerings at the
College changed frequently, with both additions and deletions to the
curriculum. The Biochemistry-Zoology major existed for only four years,
to be replaced, after a hiatus, by a new interdepartmental major,
Physiological Chemistry introduced in the mid 1940s. During the early
1940s, the chemistry department offered both a chemistry and a
biochemistry major. These options were again not long lasting, the
frequent revisions seen in the Smith College course catalogues reflecting
a perceived necessity for including biochemistry in the curriculum
coupled with the uncertainty of the best way to do this.
Finally, in 1957-58, the interdepartmental major Physiological
Chemistry was eliminated and in its place, a new interdepartmental
major, Biochemistry, established. The new major quickly became very
successful and remains so today. In 1957-58, chemistry was taught at
Stoddard Hall, and Zoology, Botany, and Bacteriology and Public Health
in Burton. In 1966, the latter three departments merged to form the
Department of Biological Sciences. 1966 was also the year of the
completion of the new Clark Science Center, which was to house
Chemistry and Biological Sciences under the same roof. The physical
bringing together of these disciplines no doubt played a significant role
in the success we celebrate this day.
Achieving this momentous mark of 50 years, Biochemistry is the
oldest interdisciplinary major at Smith College. Biochemistry has
become a discipline that has merged and integrated many aspects of cell
biology, genetics, organic and natural products chemistry, while
developing new knowledge and paradigms that are uniquely its own.
Biochemistry now includes a vast body of knowledge that belongs to
neither biology nor chemistry, as well as methodologies and techniques
that allow biochemists to formulate and test questions not examined in
other disciplines. It is a rapidly changing field, evolving and redefining
itself from day to day as exemplified by areas such as genomics,
proteomics, and drug design.
L. Burk
April 2007
Our Biochemistry Alumnae Panelists
Sevgi Boke Rodan, Ph.D. (Class of 1964-Masters)
Adjunct Professor of Biochemistry,
School of Dental Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Former Director, Department of Bone Biology and Osteoporosis
Merck Research Laboratories
Laura Worth, M.D./Ph.D. (Class of 1983)
Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Cancer Biology
MD Anderson Cancer Center
Director, Pediatric Hematology/Oncology Fellowship Program
Medical Director, Cell Therapy
Erin O’Shea, Ph.D. (Class of 1988)
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Harvard University
Director of the FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard
University
Amy Laws, Ph.D. (Class of 1998)
BD Sciences, Discovery Labware Division
Tahmeena Chowdhury (Class of 2004)
PhD graduate student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sevgi Böke Rodan
B.S. in Chemistry, American College for Girls, 1962
A. M. in Biochemistry, Smith College, 1964
Ph. D. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1969
Sevgi Rodan completed her Masters and Ph. D. working with Ken
Hellman in the Smith College Chemistry department, analyzing vitamin
B6 synthesis in corn and yeast. She started her career in bone biology as
a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Connecticut Health Center.
Because of the nature of bone tissue, in the late 1960s and the beginning
of the 70s, research in bone biology was limited to mostly histology of
bone. In order to understand bone at the cellular level, Dr. Rodan
isolated and characterized calvarial bone cells, making it possible to
study signaling by parathyroid hormone and calcitonin in these cells.
However, the cellular heterogeneity of these cells, led to the effort to
isolate and clone cells from a rat osteosarcoma, subsequently leading to
the development of stable cell lines representing various differentiated
stages of bone forming osteoblastic cell lines. The characterization of
these cell lines produced a better understanding of the osteoblastic
phenotype, including the discovery of new bone-specific or boneabundant proteins, and to further understanding of the regulation of these
proteins by calciotropic hormones. After moving to Merck & Co in
1985, she helped Gideon Rodan establish a department devoted to
research in bone biology with the intent of understanding osteoporosis, a
disease characterized by low bone mass leading to fractures. She
continued to study many aspects of osteoblasts, including growth factor
effects, the role of prostaglandins in both bone formation and bone loss,
and establishing other cell lines from rat long bones as well as from
calvaria. During this period, under the leadership of Gideon Rodan,
Fosamax was developed as the first non-hormonal drug for osteoporosis.
In the early 1990s, in an effort to identify novel drug targets for
preventing bone loss, Dr. Rodan focused her research on osteoclasts, the
cells which resorb or destroy bone. She led an effort to investigate the
role in bone loss of αvβ3 integrin, a highly abundant cell surface protein
in osteoclasts. She established assays to screen for synthetic compounds
mimicking the tripeptide arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD) which
bind to αvβ3 integrin, and ultimately demonstrated the efficacy of such
compounds in inhibiting bone loss in vivo. In the mid 1990’s, she was
also the head of biology of the group of scientists identifying and
studying potent inhibitors of Cathepsin K, a newly discovered and highly
abundant cysteine protease which destroys bone matrix and is almost
exclusively localized in osteoclasts. As a result of this work, two novel
inhibitors of bone loss are currently being tested in clinical trials for
prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.
Laura Worth
B.A. in Biochemistry, Smith College, 1983
Ph. D., University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical
Sciences at Houston, 1990
M. D., University of Texas Medical School at Houston, 1990
As an undergraduate, Dr. Worth worked in the lab of Dr. Stylianos
Scordilis at Smith College where she completed a summer internship and
Special Studies, focusing on the purification of myosin from rabbit brain.
She received her M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Texas
Medical School at Houston and The University of Texas Graduate
School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston, respectively, in 1990. For
her Ph.D., she studied the intracellular phosphorylation of ornithine
decarboxylase and the regulation of its activity. She went on to
complete an internship and residency in the Department of Pediatrics at
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston in 1994. In
1993, she also completed a year of research work in Molecular Genetics
at M.D. Anderson. In her research, she helped characterize mdm2 – a
regulator of the p53 tumor suppressor. Dr. Worth then completed a
fellowship in the Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Program at M.D.
Anderson in 1998, a program she now directs. This 3-year program with
an optional 2-year advanced training component consists of both
research and clinical training for pediatricians looking to embark upon an
academic career in pediatric hematology-oncology. She is an Associate
Professor in Pediatrics and was also named Medical Director of the Cell
Therapy Program in the Division of Pediatrics in 2006. While at M.D.
Anderson, Dr. Worth has been the Principal Investigator or Project
Leader for seven funded research projects and she served on the Study
Review Committee for Clinical Translational and Population-Based
Projects in the Institutional Research Grants Program from 2002 to 2005.
Dr. Worth was honored for her research efforts in 1998 with the BristolMyers Squibb Award in Clinical/Translational Research. Dr. Worth was
recently named the March 2007 Faculty Educator of the Month for her
work with the Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Fellowship Program at
M.D. Anderson where she mentored several pediatric residents and
postdoctoral fellows, graduate, medical, undergraduate, and high school
students. Dr. Worth recently has focused her efforts on a clinical trial
she initiated, using transplanted stem cells to treat patients suffering from
physical trauma or malignant disease. Her main projects include stem
cell transplants for the treatment of high-risk neuroblastoma and closed
head injuries, and investigating how to expand certain cell populations
within cord stem cell transplants prior to transplantation to ensure better
patient outcome.
Erin O’Shea
B. A. Biochemistry, Smith College, 1988
Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992
Erin O’Shea earned her undergraduate degree in biochemistry from
Smith College in 1988, completing her Honors thesis on the NMR
studies of insulin with Dr. Stylianos Scordilis as her Smith faculty
sponsor. Her Ph.D. degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology was for work completed with Peter Kim on the structural
biology of the leucine zipper motif of proteins. She carried out
postdoctoral research with Robert Tjian at the University of California,
Berkeley, and with Ira Herskowitz at the University of California, San
Francisco where she initiated her research in signal transduction and
gene expression in yeast, work she continued in her first faculty position
at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2000, Dr. O'Shea was
appointed as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In
collaboration with Jonathan S. Weissman, one of her first projects as an
HHMI investigator was measuring the abundance and pinpointing the
cellular locations of more than 4,000 proteins in yeast. In 2005, she
moved to Harvard University where she is Professor of Molecular and
Cellular Biology and the Director of the FAS Center for Systems
Biology. Dr. O'Shea's honors include the National Academy of Sciences
Award in Molecular Biology, a David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Fellowship, a Presidential Faculty Fellow Award, the American Society
for Cell Biology–Promega Early Career Life Science Award, and the
Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society. She is
a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. O'Shea studies how cells monitor the environment and regulate gene
expression, work that has implications for understanding cancer and
other diseases.
Amy Laws
B.A. in Biochemistry, Smith College, 1998
Ph.D. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 2004
Dr. Laws first research experience was in the laboratory of Dr. Stylianos
Scordilis. She received a summer research grant to work in his
laboratory to localize an ADP-ribosylation in actin that is involved in
maintaining the globular form of the protein in the fission yeast
Schizosaccharomyces pombe. She continued this research as a Special
Studies project during the fall semester of her junior year. During her
senior year, she did a Special Studies with Dr. Steven Williams. The
initial purpose of this study was to start the physical mapping of the B.
malayi genome, but ended by revealing the high level of the
endosymbiont Wolbachia DNA in the cosmid library. She also worked
for the New England Biolabs Molecular Biology and PCR Summer
Workshop at Smith for three summers, an intensive Molecular Biology
workshop run by Dr. Williams for researchers in academia and industry.
She joined the joint George Washington University – NIH Ph.D.
program in Genetics, but after one year transferred to the Molecular and
Cellular Biology Program (MCB) at the University of Massachusetts.
There she completed her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr. Barbara Osborne,
studying the role of Notch signaling in T cell development. As a
graduate student, she received a travel grant to present her data as a
speaker at the European Immunology Congress. Dr. Laws completed her
postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Dr. Ann Marshak-Rothstein,
where she focused on Toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling in B cells of
patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune
disease. TLRs are pattern recognition receptors that bind to bacterial and
viral components, such as lipopolysaccharide, DNA and RNA. To
prevent activation by the individual’s own nucleic acids, the receptors
that recognize DNA and RNA are localized in intracellular
compartments. In SLE, anti-DNA, anti-nucleosome and anti-RNA
antibodies are generated, which can lead to activation of B cells and
dendritic cells by facilitating uptake of these nucleic acids to endosomal
compartments. Dr. Laws focused on the ability of cytokines, secreted
proteins that modulate the immune response, to modulate B cell
responses to both TLR ligands and immune complexes composed of
chromatin-antibody complexes, characteristic of those found in SLE
patient sera. Studying TLRs in these types of in vitro systems allows a
better understanding of data from animal models and will, hopefully,
yield more directed treatments for SLE. Dr. Laws has recently started
working at Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD Biosciences) as a
Technical Support Representative, where she is utilizing her research
background to troubleshoot customers’ experiments.
Tahmeena Chowdhury
B. A. in Biochemistry, Smith College, 2004
Ph. D. candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Tahmeena Chowdhury completed several internships during her
undergraduate career. During summer 2001, she was an an intern in the
Laboratory Sciences Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal
Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) working with Dr. Firdausi
Qadri. She completed the 2002 Undergraduate Student Summer
Research Internship in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular
Biology at the University of Chicago, researching DNA recognition by
IHF and HU DNA-bending proteins with her research advisor Dr.
Phoebe Rice. In the summer of 2003, she worked with Dr. Thomas
Silhavy in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University
where her research on the regulation of rpoS translation by the
transcription factor LrhA was recently published in the Journal of
Bacteriology. Tahmeena worked with Dr. Betsy Jamieson from 20022004 during the academic school year on oxidation at the C4’ sugar of
deoxyribonucleotide triphosphates by chromium(V) complexes, a project
that has been published recently in the journal Mutation Research.
Tahmeena has also presented her research at several scientific meetings.
Tahmeena is presently completing her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr.
Tania Baker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, exploring the
role of the adaptor protein SspB in substrate selection by the ClpXP
protease in Escherichia coli. At MIT, Tahmeena was awarded the
Praecis Presidential Fellowship.