Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America July, 2015 Newsletter Editor: Gen-Sheng Feng, Ph.D. Production Editor: Chris Lau, Ph.D. FROM THE PRESIDENT S DESK.. Respectfully yours, Dear SCBA members: Welcome to the July 2015 issue of the SCBA Newsletter. I am delighted to tell you that the 2015 SCBA International Symposium in Taipei with 845 participants is highly successful I d like to express my heartfelt thanks to the five local sponsor institutions for their generous support, to all our invited speakers and editors, to all attendees of the Symposium, and especially, to the organizing committee members for their tremendous efforts in building the strong program. As promised, the Symposium provided a scientific feast. Below are a few highlights: 1. Keynote speakers Dr. Thomas Steitz (Nobel Laureate), Dr. Lewis Cantley, and Dr. Ronald DePinho delivered inspiring keynote lectures. The plenary lectures, award lectures, and meet the editor session were superb. 2. The Symposium provided an excellent forum for networking among bioscientists. 3. This Symposium has been a showcase of trainees' excellent scientific performance. More than 150 trainees presented their high quality research. Eight trainees received travel awards and 20 received poster presentation awards. CONGRATULATIONS I recommend you to see some of the memorable moments of the Symposium by click the link to some of the Symposium photos. Please download anyone your wish to keep. http://scba2015.meeting.sinica.edu.tw/photo.html This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of the SCBA. Through the concerted efforts of many founding members and all our members, SCBA now is a strong and influential scientific organization with over 3,000 distinguished members all over the world. The Symposium serves as a significant hallmark of the SCBA success and the positive impact that all our members have brought collectively to the biomedical fields. At this time when we celebrate our success, we would diligently continue our tradition of excellence in sciences which requires contributions from all of us. Dear Members of the SCBA, Dihua Yu, M.D., Ph.D. SCBA President (2014-2015) NOTES FROM THE SECRETARY Through the hard work of President Yu, the organizing committee and all participants, the 2015 biannual meeting of SCBA in Taipei is over, and it s a big success We shall publish more about this conference in the next issue. Here we are pleased to announce the 2015 election results of SCBA officers and council members. Dr. Pu Paul Liu, an internationally renowned scientist at NHGRI, NIH, will assume the SCBA Presidency, January 1, 2018-December 31, 2019. Dr. Liu will work with elected Secretary, Professor Jianming Xu at Baylor College of Medicine, and elected Treasurer, Dr. Pan Zheng at Children s National Medical Center in Washington, DC. Drs. Keji Zhao at NIH and Mien-Chie Hung at MD Anderson Cancer Center are the Councilor-Elect. Dr. Yingzi Yang at Harvard Medical School will chair the Nomination Committee and Dr. Wei Gu at Columbia University will be the chair of the Membership Committee. We thank all of them and the elected committee members for their willingness to serve the society. At this year s conference, Dr. Horace Loh, Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota won the Lifetime Achievement Award for his broad and enormous contributions to biomedical sciences in the past few decades. Dr. Wei Yang, a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, was given the Presidential Award for her pioneering work in DNA recombination and repair June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 1
mechanisms. Drs. Hongjun Song and Nieng Yan, two rising stars, won the Junior Scientist s Achievement Award for their breakthrough work in neuroscience and structural biology, respectively. Congratulatioins for all the winners Respectfully yours, Announcement of the SCBA Awards for 2015 and the 2015 election results are attached below. A MESSAGE FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CELL & BIOSCIENCE THE SCBA SOCIETY JOURNAL Dear SCBA Members: Dear Members of the SCBA, Gen-Sheng Feng, Ph.D SCBA Secretary (2014-2015) NOTES FROM THE TREASURER The 2015 SCBA Biennial Symposium was a great success. In association with the Symposium, we had a surge in membership applications. For the months of April to June, we collected $4,460 membership fees. In addition, we received the remaining $5,000 donation from the Tsai-fan Yu Foundation to support the Tsai-fan Yu Legacy Lecture, making the total contribution from the Foundation $10,000. On the expense front and as part of the Society s history, we contributed $1,000 to the SCBA Texas Chapter to support their annual symposium held in May, 2015. It was wonderful seeing many of you in Taipei and thank you for all your effort in making the Symposium such a memorable event. Sincerely, I would like to report some progress of our society journal: Cell & Bioscience (http://www.cellandbioscience.com/). Our journal is four and half year old and has just received our third official IF of 3.63 in June, 2015. We owe you our gratitude for your continued support that has been essential for our success so far. Our readership and submission have been consistently growing. We published 78 articles in 2014, about 80% more than that in 2013. In the first half of this year, we have already published 35 articles. Aside from regular submissions, we also publish special issues on different subjects. Each special issue consists of 3-6 articles with an editorial by the guest editor and is published as a thematic series with its own dedicated webpage, in addition to appearing as normal papers on the Cell & Bioscience homepage. Our publisher, BMC, promotes special issues on the BioMed Central fortnightly newsletter. Thus, this is a great platform to promote subjects of your interest. Our two most recent series are on Transcriptional regulation and disease, Edited by Dr Yi-Ching Wang, and Structure and mechanism of nanomotors in the cell, Edited by Dr Peixuan Guo. Please see the thematic series at http://www.cellandbioscience.com/series. We cover all the publication charges for any papers in the thematic series. If you are interested in organizing one, please contact us at <editorial@cellandbioscience.com>. Finally, for those of you who have not done so, please take a couple of minutes to register with the journal (if you have registered with any BMC journals, you can use the same login information for this) and sign up for Article Alerts and Updates at the following link: Hui Zheng, Ph.D SCBA Treasurer (2014-2015) http://www.cellandbioscience.com/logon?url=%2fmy%2fpr eferences We hope you consider Cell & Bioscience as a home for your research and submit your manuscript via our online June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 2
submission system. Visit our instructions for authors or contact editorial@cellandbioscience.com for more information. Thanks for your support and with best wishes, Yun-Bo Shi Editor-in-Chief VISIBILITY OF CHINESE BIOSCIENTISTS -MIEN-CHIE HUNG, HOUSTON CHAPTER Following the success of the Fifteenth Biennial Symposium of The Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America (SCBA), which was held on June 26-29, 2015, in Taipei, I would like to share some thoughts with my fellow SCBA colleagues. This meeting brought together over 800 outstanding scientists, including a Nobel Laureate, 12 members of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS)/ National Academy of Medicine (NAM), and numerous Academicians of Academia Sinica in Taiwan. I was very impressed by the large number of excellent presentations in 51 concurrent sessions while attending the three and a half-day symposium. Looking back, our pioneer leaders Drs. Horace Loh, CC Wang, and Tommy Cheng, among others started the Society 30 years ago with a goal of promoting visibility and bringing Chinese bioscientists together in North America. At that time, I was a postdoctoral fellow transitioning into an assistant professor, and had noticed that many Chinese were first authors on high-impact publications but rarely served as corresponding/senior authors. Nowadays, I see Chinese names not only as first authors but also corresponding authors on many important publications in prestigious journals. For instance, Nature Publishing Index Asia-Pacific in 2015 reported that the number of research articles in Nature and/or Nature monthly research journals published from China jumped from 49 in 2006 to 492 in 2014. The rapid increase in the rate of publication in high impact journals from Chinese community is astounding. We are truly grateful that the Symposium was attended by three outstanding keynote speakers Drs. Thomas Steitz, Lewis Cantley, and Ronald DePinho, as well as Dr. Susan Horwitz who delivered the Tsai-Fan Yu Memorial Lecture. They are all successful scientists and role models for many of us. It was also very delightful to see that many outstanding Chinese bioscientists, who were special lecturers or plenary speakers, are NAS/NAM members, too, including Drs. Chi-Huey Wong, Wah Chiu, Xinnian Dong, Sunny Xie, Li-Huei Tsai, Wei Yang, Yuan Chang, Mu-Ming Poo, and Louise Chow. We greatly appreciate their participation in the symposium to share with fellow SCBA members their path to a successful career in innovative science, and in some cases, even their struggles leading to their success. It is worthwhile to note that there were not as many Chinese bioscientists who were NAS/NAM members attending the biennial symposia two or three decades ago. In recent decades, there is an exponential growth in the number of Chinese bioscientists in the global scientific community. We are proud of and applaud some of them for their outstanding work recognized by prestigious awards, and/or being inducted into the US NAS/NAM, and other elite scientific organizations. Yet, one would wonder whether some might have been overlooked? If so, why? And, whether we could change that to promote the visibility of Chinese bioscientists. Regarding this issue, it occurred to me during the symposium that Dr. Lieping Chen, a plenary speaker is an excellent example of this case. His seminal paper published in Cell in 1992 conceptualized immune modulation of cancer. Not only did he co-discover the PD-1/PD-L1 pathways in 1999, but he also established the principle of anti-pd-1/pd-l1 antibody therapy in 2002 as well as facilitated the first-in-man clinical trial of anti-pd-1 antibody for cancer treatment in 2006. Yet, Dr. Chen is not nearly as visible as other colleagues in the field of immune checkpoint. Recognition of scientific achievement has never been an easy task. In my humble opinion, Lieping deserves more recognition especially when the anti-pd-1/pd-l1 antibodies have shown encouraging response rate in multiple clinical trials. Some colleagues are better recognized and go on to receive awards, which are well deserved, because of the impact of their contributions. But, why not Lieping? This is an important and timely issue that we as Chinese bioscientists should contemplate carefully ( 深思 ). The degree of visibility of a person can often be shaped by the culture recognizing their success or popularity. For Chinese bioscientists to be more appropriately recognized, we need to encourage our own scientific communities to create awards recognizing success. Using the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) as an example, many AACR award recipients went on to be elected as NAS/NAM members. Similarly, many Nobel Laureates were recipients of awards from The Lasker Foundation. Thus, the scientific communities and institutions where the Chinese bioscientists are affiliated should create more recognition mechanisms, such as awards and named lectures, to promote the visibility of fellow members so that they can be more appropriately recognized globally June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 3
The article is intended to toss a brick to attract jade ( 拋磚引玉 ). I sincerely hope to inspire more ideas on how to increase the visibility of Chinese bioscientists. And importantly, we as Chinese bioscientists should continue our best efforts on advancing science and making impacts on our well-being and the scientific community as a whole. SCBA Newsletter is an official quarterly publication of the Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America. For more information, please visit SCBA website: http://www.scbasociety.org/. Newsletter Editor: Gen-Sheng Feng, Ph.D. (gfeng@ucsd.edu) Production Editor: Chris Lau, Ph.D. (chris.lau@ucsf.edu) Copyright 2015. Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America. All rights reserved. June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 4
Society of Chinese Bioscientists in America 2015 SCBA Awards LifetimeAchievementAward HoraceH.Loh,Ph.D.,RegentProfessor DepartmentofPharmacology UniversityofMinnesotaMedicalSchool Inrecognitionofhisdistinguishedcareer,pioneeringachievementsandleadershipin biochemicalneuropharmacology,especiallyontheneurochemicalmechanismsof opioidaddiction PresidentialAward WeiYang,Ph.D.,SeniorScientist LaboratoryofMolecularBiology NationalInstituteofDiabetesandDigestiveandKidneyDiseases NationalInstitutesofHealth Inrecognitionofherexceptionalandgroundbreakingachievementsandleadershipin structuralbiology,especiallyonmechanismsindnarecombinationandgenome mutations JuniorAchievementAwards NiengYan,Ph.D.,BayerProfessor SchoolofMedicine TsinghuaUniversity Inrecognitionofherexceptionalandgroundbreakingachievementsandasarising starinthefieldofstructuralbiologyandmembraneproteinbiochemistry,especially onthestructuralandmechanisticunderstandingofthemajorfacilitatorsuperfamilyof transporters HongjunSong,Ph.D.,Professor InstituteforCellEngineering JohnsHopkinsUniversitySchoolofMedicine Inrecognitionofhisexceptionalandgroundbreakingachievementsandasarisingstar intheneuroscienceandstemcellbiologyfields,especiallyinelucidatingthe mechanismsandfunctionsofneuralstemcellsandneurogenesisinmammalianbrain June28,2015 Taipei,Taiwan June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 5
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE SCBA SYMPOSIUM TRAVEL AWARDEES: Chia-Chi Chang, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX Min-Yi Lin, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Wei-Chih Tsai, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX Wen Hsuan Yu, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX Wen-Ling Kuo, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX Chih-Han Antony Tang, Wistar Institute, Philadelphia, PA Wentong Yao, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX Tina Yuan, University of California, San Francisco, CA CONGRATULATIONS TO THE SCBA SYMPOSIUM POSTER AWARDEES: Jeffy Chern, Academia Sinica Shih-Ying Tsai, Academia Sinica Tsung-Ting Tsai, Taipei Medical University Bo-Wei Chen, National Tsing Hua University Tian-Neng Li, National Tsing Hua University Mun-Teng Wong, Academia Sinica Meng-Ting Yang, Nat. Chung Hsing Univ.-Academia Sincia Hu Zhou, Xiamen University Ping-Hsueh Kuo, National Tsing Hua University Jian-Jun Deng, Univ. of Hong Kong-Northwest Univ. Yoshikazu Takada, Taipei Medical University Jessica Yu, Taipei Medical University Vidyanath Chaudhary, University of Hong Kong Shuo-Wen Hsu, Academia Sinica-National Chun Tsing Univ. Jei-Hwa Yu, Development Center for Biotechnolgy En-Ju Chou, Nat. Defense Med. Center-Academia Sinica Wen-Shu Chen, National Taiwan University Chen-Chen Lee, China Medical University-Asia Univ. Chia-Huei Lee, National Health Research Institutes Chien-Hung Shih, National Tsing Hua University Wei-Wei Gao, University of Hong Kong June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 6
June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 7
8 th International MDM2 Workshop New Orleans, Louisiana November 1-4, 2015 Dear Members of the Scientific Community, We are pleased to announce that registration for the 8 th International MDM2 Workshop has begun. Please use the following URL to obtain additional information or to register at your earliest convenience: http://www.mdm2-2015.com/ MDM2 is an oncoprotein that can inactivate the tumor suppressor p53 as a negative autofeedback regulator. The deregulation of this MDM2-p53 pathway is associated with all types of human cancer and vitally important to human cancer development and progression. Targeting this pathway has become a critical strategy for the development of anti-cancer therapy. The Tulane University School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, is honored to host this event in the international city of New Orleans, world renowned for hot jazz music, fine cuisine and historic beauty. For additional information, questions or to join our email listerv, contact Gilbert Estrada at implant@tulane.edu. Hua Lu, New Orleans, and Wei Gu, New York Co-Organizers June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 8
June 2015 SCBA Newsletter 9