UW News

June 6, 2002

Krebs Lecture features Goodman of Vollum Institute

Claire Dietz
HS News & Community Relations


Dr. Richard Goodman, director and senior scientist at the Vollum Institute of Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), will give the 15th annual Edwin G. Krebs Lecture in Molecular Pharmacology on Thursday, June 27.

He will speak on “Regulation of Transcriptional Coactivators and Corepressors” at 3:30 p.m. in room T-625 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture, sponsored by the Department of Pharmacology and supported by an endowment from Sterling Winthrop Inc., is free and open to everyone.


Along with directing the Vollum Institute, Goodman is also a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Cell and Developmental Biology, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at OHSU. He is also vice chair of the Department of Medicine.


The major focus of Goodman’s lab is to determine how signals within cells and outside of them are integrated to regulate the expression of genes. His laboratory was first to identify cyclic AMP-regulated enhancer (CRE), which is now recognized as a critical control element in many genes expressed in the nervous system and other tissues. The presence of this element in several different gene promoters allows coordinated regulation of gene expression.


His lab has also identified CBP, a binding protein that is involved as an activator in pathways of gene expression. Along with activators, there are also repressors of gene expression. Another function of CBP is to reverse repressive effects. A recent focus of Goodman’s lab is to understand the actions of the corepressor CtBP, which has functions that exactly oppose those of CBP.


Goodman graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. He trained in medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center and was an endocrinology fellow at New England Medical Center and Massachusetts General Hospital. He was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and practiced at Tufts-New England Medical Center from 1982 until 1990, when he moved to Oregon.


He is on the National Advisory Council for the National Institute of Digestive, Diabetes and Kidney Diseases and has been chair of the NIDDK Board of Scientific Counselors. He has received many awards, including the Discovery Award of the Medical Research Foundation of Oregon and the McKnight Neuroscience Senior Investigator Award. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year.


Dr. Edwin Krebs, for whom the lecture is named, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992 with Dr. Edmond Fischer, UW professor emeritus of biochemistry. Krebs is UW professor emeritus of pharmacology and biochemistry. He is internationally known for his pioneering work in unraveling the complex pathways by which hormones and drugs regulate cellular function through protein phosphorylation.


Krebs first joined the School of Medicine faculty in 1948. He was chair of the Department of Pharmacology from 1977 until 1983. He has received many other honors for his fundamental work on protein kinases and their role in cellular regulation.