Dr. Elizabeth Hong-Geller

HISTORICAL SOCIETY News:

Dr. Elizabeth Hong-Geller will present a talk titled “Our Biosecurity Mission: From Radiation Biology to the Plague” at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 14 at Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos. The talk is part of the Los Alamos Historical Society lecture series “Frontiers.”

Biology research at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) started with the study of radiation effects on living systems. In the last 50 years, innovation in biology has driven scientific discoveries in animal research, flow cytometry, the Human Genome Project, vaccine development, and infectious disease.  

More recently, as a means to develop our national energy mission, research has turned to bioenergy for the production of renewable fuels from biomass. Hong-Geller will trace the history of LANL research in the biological sciences and then focus on host-pathogen biology and mechanisms of pathogen infection.

Hong-Geller is the deputy group leader of the Biosecurity and Public Health Group in the Biosciences Division at LANL. She received her BA from Columbia University in biochemistry in 1991. She then went to graduate school at MIT and got her PhD in cell and molecular biology in 1997. Hong-Geller spent three years at Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow before coming to Los Alamos in 2000. 

At Los Alamos, she has worked on a variety of projects in pathogen virulence and host response and immunity.

Visit http://www.losalamoshistory.org/Events.htm for more information on this talk or the “Frontiers” lecture series.