Professor Vinothan Manoharan (Department of Physics, Harvard University) gave the 7th annual Carolyn & Charles Knobler Lecture on February 27, 2023.
The well-attended lecture, entitled “The Self-Assembly of Simple RNA Viruses”, was followed by a question-and-answer period and then by a reception in the Young Hall Cafe Commons. Select photos from the event are below. The Carolyn and Charles Knobler Lecture is an endowed lecture series made possible by the strong support of alumni, colleagues, and friends of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry.
In his welcoming remarks, Professor Bill Gelbart (right) paid tribute to the five decades of extraordinary research, teaching, and service contributions of Carolyn and Charles “Chuck” Knobler, and enumerated some of the important research achievements of the speaker, Professor Vinothan Manoharan, a world leader in the development and exploitation of holographic and other optical interferometric techniques for studying fundamental aspects of colloidal and nanoparticle self-assembly.
About the Carolyn & Charles Knobler Lecture
The Carolyn & Charles Knobler Lectures are made possible by the strong support of alumni, colleagues, and friends. The lecture honors Prof. Charles “Chuck” Knobler and his wife Dr. Carolyn Knobler (pictured left) who have been extraordinary contributors to the science, life, and spirit of the UCLA Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry for over more than five decades.
The inaugural Carolyn & Charles Knobler Lecture took place on January 12, 2015 with a lecture by Prof. Donald Hilvert (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) on the rational design of protein cages. The 2016 lecture was by Prof. Sharon Glotzer (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) on novel phases of colloids and nanoparticles, the 2017 lecture was by Prof. Michael Hagan (Brandeis University) on the physics of viral self-assembly, the 2018 lecture was by Prof. Jean-François Joanny (ESPCI Paris and Institut Curie Paris) on the physics of tissue monolayers and incipient tumors, the 2019 lecture was by Prof. Daan Frenkel (University of Cambridge), on generalizations of the statistical definition of entropy to include out-of-equilibrium systems, and the 2020 lecture was by Professor Bogdan Dragnea (Indiana University at Bloomington) on super-radiance and other coherent emission effects involving viral capsids. (Due to the pandemic, there were no lectures in 2021 and 2022.)
Article and photos by Penny Jennings, UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
