VCU news

By Lorraine Cichowski
VCU News Services

Noted Swiss scientist Bernard Testa, pictured right, an expert in drug discovery and design, is the first external fellow of VCU’s Center for the Study of Biological Complexity.

Testa, professor and director of the Institute of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Lausanne, arrived in Richmond Saturday, Nov. 9, for an extended visit scheduled to include a lecture to a class of Life Sciences 101 students, a seminar on his research in the area of biological complexity for all interested VCU faculty, students and staff and a series of meetings on both the Academic and MCV campuses.

“This is part of the ‘think tank’ component of the center,” said Gregory A. Buck, Ph.D., who directs the Center for the Study of Biological Complexity. “We are trying to build the capacity where we have active off-site and on-site participation by our external fellows.” 

In his lecture Monday, Testa described “Xenobiotics and the Human Body” to more than 350 undergraduates in Life Sciences 101. His faculty seminar, co-sponsored by the center and the Department of Medicinal Chemistry in VCU’s School of Pharmacy, was entitled, “Structure and Activity Revisited: Property Spaces and Emergent Biological Responses.

Testa, author of more than 400 publications, is best known for his studies of the complex chemistries of biological metabolism. His latest book, “The Metabolism of Drugs and other Xenobiotics: Biochemistry of Redox Reactions,” is one of more than 30 he has edited or authored. Testa has participated on the editorial boards of many distinguished journals, has been a member of many scientific societies, including the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, and has received honorary doctoral degrees from the Universities of Milan, Montpellier and Parma. He is the latest recipient of the Nauta Award on Pharmacochemistry, the highest award for a medicinal chemist in Europe.

Buck said environmental scientist Robert E. Ulanowicz, Ph.D., professor of theoretical ecology at the Center for Environmental Science at the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, would visit VCU as an external fellow this winter.

Ulanowicz has researched the estuarine hydrography of the Chesapeake Bay and explored methods for inverse modeling of ecological systems. His current interests include network analysis of trophic exchanges in ecosystems, information theory as applied to ecological systems, the thermodynamics of living systems, causality in living systems and modeling subtropical wetland ecosystems in Florida and Belize. His books include, “Ecology, the Ascendent Perspective.”

The Center for the Study of Biological Complexity, housed at the Trani Center for Life Sciences, is a multidisciplinary research-and-training program focused on applying discovery science, systems biology and the principles of complexity to problems in the areas of genomics, proteomics and computational bioinformatics.