Tsinghua conferred the title of Honorary Professor on Professor Robert G. Roeder of Rockefeller University

On August 15th, a ceremony at which Tsinghua University conferred the title of Honorary Professor on Robert G. Roeder of Rockefeller University was held in the reception hall of the main building. Vice President Yang Bin of Tsinghua University and Academician Shi Yigong of the School of Life Sciences jointly presented the letter of appointment to Professor Roeder. At the same time, the Conference “1969-2019: 50 Years of Eukaryotic Transcription” was also held in the reception hall of the main building, to honor the 50th anniversary of Professor Roeder’s discovery of eukaryotic RNA polymerase.

At the conference, Academician Rao Zihe of the Tsinghua School of Medicine also presented Professor Roeder with the 2019 Shitsan Pai International Award on behalf of the Biophysical Society of China . Professor Roeder gave a report entitled “50 Years of Eukaryotic Transcription: An Expanding Universe” at the conference, reviewing the 50-year history of research on eukaryotic transcription.

Finally, Professor Dinshaw Patel of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center delivered a lecture entitled “Structural Biology of Epigenetic Regulation: Linking Histone and DNA Methylation”. Professor Xie Xiaoliang of Peking University gave an academic report entitled “Understanding Transcription Factors in Decoding the Human Functional Genome”.  The two reports respectively explained the complexity and importance of eukaryotic transcription regulation from the perspectives of epigenetics and functional genomics.

Editors: Guo Lili, John Olbrich