Athens, Ga. – B.C. Wang, professor and Ramsey/Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Structural Biology at the University of Georgia, has been named winner of the 2008 A. Lindo Patterson Award from the American Crystallographic Association.
The Patterson Award, established in 1980, is given every three years to recognize and encourage outstanding contributions to the methodology of structure determination. Wang will receive the award in May 2008 at the annual meeting of the ACA in Knoxville, Tenn. He will receive a monetary award of $1,500, travel expenses and a certificate.
The award is generally announced a year ahead of time so that a special symposium during the ACA annual meeting can be organized to highlight the award recipient’s work.
After post-doctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, Wang, a native of China, joined the University of Pittsburgh. He rose through the ranks to become professor in the departments of crystallography and biological sciences and then moved to the University of Georgia in 1995 as professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology.
Wang has served on the biophysical chemistry study section for the National Institutes of Health, as president of the Pittsburgh Diffraction Society and as co-editor of Crystallographic Reviews. In 1997, Wang initiated and founded the Southeast Regional Collaborative Access Team, a consortium of 25 institutions for the use of synchrotron X-rays at the Advanced Photon Source of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
From 2000 to 2006, he directed the NIH-funded Southeast Collaboratory for Structural Genomics. In 2005, he was co-founder of the Global Structural Proteomics Initiative between the United Kingdom and the Southeastern United States and currently serves as the U.S. coordinator. His research is supported by the NIH, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Georgia Research Alliance.
Throughout his long career, Wang has also contributed to crystallographic education as director of the ACA Summer School.
