11:00 am – 11:40 am MT:

Exopolysaccharide biosynthesis

Dr. Lynne Howell
Professor, University of Toronto

Dr. Lynne Howell is a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), where she has held administrative roles as Head of the Program in Molecular Medicine (formerly the Program in Molecular Structure & Function) from 2002-2014 and as Associate Chief, Research Integration and Communication 2014-2016. She holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Structural Biology and is a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Toronto.

Dr. Howell obtained her undergraduate degree in Biophysics from the University of Leeds in 1983, and her Ph.D. from the University of London in 1986 under the direction of Professor Dame Julia Goodfellow. She spent three years as a PDF at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Paris for two years to study at the Institute Pasteur. She joined The Hospital for Sick Children in late 1991 and was cross-appointed to the University of Toronto shortly afterwards. Dr. Howell is interested in the development of novel antibiotics and is currently focused on phenomena that are critical for bacterial biofilm development. Her contributions over the past twenty years to the structural biology field range from the development and application of novel methods for routine structure determination using X-ray crystallographic techniques to the de novo structure determination of over 140 structures. Her research has resulted in over 145 publications and >200 abstracts. Her expertise, international stature, advocacy and strong commitment to the structural biology field have also resulted in her current appointments as a member of the Board of Directors of the Canadian Light Source, the Canadian National Committee for Crystallography and the formerly Commission for Biological Macromolecules of the International Union of Crystallography (2008-2017); the governing body for the Crystallographic community worldwide. Dr. Howell is a former recipient of a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Investigator Award.