Jurnak Is Elected ACA Vice President

Frances Jurnak took office on 1 January as vice president of the American Crystallographic Association for 2003. A professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), she succeeds Raymond E. Davis, who is now ACA’s president (see Physics Today, March 2002, page 84 ).

Jurnak received her BS in chemistry in 1968 from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, and her PhD in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973. From 1974 to 1977, she was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in the field of molecular biology. Immediately following that position, she did postdoctoral work in biochemistry at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, until 1979. That same year, Jurnak established her own laboratory in the biochemistry department at the University of California, Riverside, where she eventually became a full professor in the department of biochemistry and a research scientist in the agricultural experiment station. At Riverside, Jurnak worked on the structure-function relationships of elongation factor Tu and on pectate lyases, which led to the discovery of the parallel beta helix fold.

In 1997, she moved to UCI’s department of physiology and biophysics. There, she has focused on the structures of proteins involved in carcinogenic mechanisms and in advanced molecular biological strategies for the preparation of soluble, folded proteins suitable for structural studies. She directs UCI’s protein expression facility and codirects the structural molecular biology program in the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, which is in UCI’s College of Medicine. Over her career, Jurnak has chaired or served as a member of numerous university committees on undergraduate and graduate education.

“I am delighted by this opportunity to serve the ACA,” says Jurnak. She adds that she is “looking forward to preserving the best of the past while fostering technical innovations that will advance crystallographic goals in the future.”

In other ACA election results, three individuals also took office in January, all for four-year terms. Louis T. J. Delbaere (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) was elected to the communications committee. Katherine Kantardjieff (California State University, Fullerton) began her term on the continuing education committee. Elected to the data committee was Robert Sweet (Brook-haven National Laboratory).