By Robert Emro

The 2005-6 Harold A. Iddles Lecture Series brings to the University of New Hampshire a chemist known around the world for her contributions to the fundamental understanding of the functioning of the immune system.

Pamela Björkman, the Max Delbrück Professor of Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the California Institute of Technology, has made discoveries that have had a major impact in autoimmune diseases, HIV, cancer, and most recently, iron metabolism. She pioneered using x-ray crystallography with molecular biology and biochemistry to determine the structure of proteins involved in cell surface recognition.

Her research team has solved the structures of 20 different proteins and protein/receptor complexes, including the protein that is mutated in hereditary hemochromatosis, the iron overload disease. Her team also first described the protein that causes cachexia, a wasting syndrome in cancer and AIDS patients. Because it triggers weight loss, that protein could provide a blueprint for obesity medication.

Björkman will give two lectures on Tuesday, April 18. The first, a technical presentation titled “The Molecular Basis of Iron Overload in Hereditary Hemochromatosis,” will begin at 11:10 a.m. in Iddles Auditorium L103 (Parsons Hall). The second lecture, intended for a more general audience, is titled “What We Can Learn from 3D Structures of Proteins” and will begin at 4 p.m. in Iddles L101.

For her discovery of how the immune system recognizes targets, Björkman recently won the 2006 L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science. In 1995 she was awarded the Outstanding Young Alumni Award and in 2004 the Alumni Achievement in Chemistry Award by the University of Oregon. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997, the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and the American Philosophical Society in 2002. She was a recipient of the William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Fundamental Immunology from the Cancer Research Institute, the James R. Klinenberg Science Award from the Arthritis Foundation, the Gairdner Foundation International Award for Achievements in Medical Science, and the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize in Medicine from the Federal Republic of Germany.