The BioDiscovery Institute is proud to announce the speaker for thier annual BDI Distinguished Lecturer Series: Dr. Maureen McCann, Director of the BioSciences Center at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. Dr. McCann has a distinguished research record at the forefront of understanding how the molecular machinery of the plant cell wall contributes to cell growth and specialization, and to the final stature and form of plants. A current research trajectory is applying this expertise to groundbreaking advances in technologies that maximize the energy and carbon efficiencies of biofuel production by the rational and synergistic design of both physical and chemical conversion processes and the biomass itself. Dr. McCann is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Dr. McCann will deliver her BDI Distinguished Lecture "News from the Cell's Frontier" on Thursday, October 27, at 3:30pm in the Eagle Student Services Center lecture theater, ESSC 255. A moderated Q&A session will follow.
Dr. McCann will give a second talk "Growing the Bioeconomy: Can we Decouple Our Economic Prosperity From Fossil Fuel Consumption?" on Friday, October 28 at 3:00pm, in the Department of Biological Sciences' weekly BioFrontiers seminar series, which, for this special event, will also be in ESSC 255.
Both lectures are open to the public and both will be accessible through Zoom. Please contact Dr. Brian Ayre at Brian.Ayre@unt.edu for links to the zoom events.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Prior to joining NREL in 2020, Dr. McCann was a Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University and Director of Purdue's NEPTUNE Center for Power and Energy, funded by the Office of Naval Research. Dr. McCann also served as the Director of the Center for Direct Catalytic Conversion of Biomass to Biofuels (C3Bio), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science. Within C3Bio, her lab explored synthetic biology and genetic engineering approaches to optimize cell wall and biomass structure for chemical conversion processes. Prior to joining the faculty at Purdue, Dr. McCann was a project leader at the John Innes Centre, a government-funded research institute for plant and microbial sciences in Norwich, United Kingdom, where she was funded by The Royal Society University Research Fellowship. Dr. McCann serves on DOE's Biological and Environmental Remediation Advisory Committee and she has served as President of the American Society of Plant Biologists.
More information on Dr. McCann's exceptional contributions to bioenergy research and policy can be found at the NREL website: https://www.nrel.gov/research/staff/maureen-mccann.html.