Englund Lectureship
About the Englund Lecture: This lectureship is named after Dr. Paul Englund
Dr. Paul Englund was a renowned biochemist and parasitologist from the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and he had a very close connection with the MBL and BoP. Dr. Englund was a student in the 1959 Invertebrate Zoology course and in the 1961 Physiology course. He was a faculty member at BoP, he served as course director from 1985 to 1988, and he was an emeritus member of the MBL Society.
Among many distinctions, Paul Englund was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and was an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
As a researcher, Dr. Englund conducted postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg and then went on to define the structure of mitochondrial DNA in African trypanosomes, which can cause fatal sleeping sickness in sub-Saharan Africa. He also discovered trypanosomes’ unique mechanism of fatty acid synthesis and the role of fatty acids in anchoring the variant surface glycoproteins (VSG) on the trypanosome surface, which enable the parasites to evade the immune system.
Beyond his professional accomplishments, Dr. Englund was known as a genuine, kind, generous, and supportive friend and colleague to all who had the pleasure of meeting him.
Past and present Englund Lectures
2023 - Maryse Lebrun: "An evolution-based approach to decipher rhoptry secretion in apicomplexan parasites." University of Montpellier, France
2022 - Jay Bangs: "What a long strange tryp it’s been: VSGs, GPIs & protein trafficking in African trypanosomes." University of Buffalo, USA
2021 - Malcolm McConville: "Dissecting global metabolic networks required for virulence of parasitic protists." University of Melbourne, Australia