Graduate Alumni
Graduate Alumni
As we continue to improve our alumni outreach efforts, we would like to invite you to the biennial Graduate & Post-Doctoral Career Day on October 19, 2009, and the annual Graduate Student Research Forum on March 5, 2010. Stay tuned to this Web page for future updates.
And congratulations to James C. Alwine, Ph.D., ’74 (biological chemistry) - the first graduate alumnus to be named an Alumni Fellow by Penn State College of Medicine! Alwine spoke at Convocation on September 11 about “Why basic science research remains vital in the era of translational medicine."
Alumni Fellow–James C. Alwine, Ph.D.
His research has been shaped by his fascination with viruses, which began when he was 6 years old during the polio epidemic in the 1950s and the development of the first polio vaccine. Throughout his career, he has studied the effects of DNA viruses on transcriptional processes, RNA processing, and most recently, cellular signaling and metabolism. He strongly believes that viruses have a much greater role in promoting oncogenesis than presently accepted. His research on cellular and viral processes led him to develop the Northern transfer, a technique used for analyzing RNA.
Alwine has published more than 75 peer-reviewed research papers and has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Virology, Gene Expression, DNA and Cell Biology, and Molecular and Cellular Biology. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Microbiology, and the American Society for Virology. He currently serves on the National Institutes of Health’s Reviewer’s Reserve Committee.
His devotion to cancer research has earned him numerous awards, including Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the O.F. Stambaugh Outstanding Chemistry Alumni Award from Elizabethtown College.
During his career at the University of Pennsylvania, Alwine has worked as an assistant dean for the School of Medicine and director of the graduate programs in cell growth and cancer, microbiology and virology, and cell and molecular biology. He was honored with the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching.
After leaving Penn State College of Medicine, he completed postdoctoral work in molecular biology and molecular virology at Stanford University and the National Institutes of Health.