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| Chemical ecologist Walter Leal will share the podium with four Nobel Prize winners at an event celebrating the International Year of Chemistry. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey) |
DAVIS--Chemical ecologist Walter Leal, professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, will be sharing the podium with four Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and a scientist who helped discover Viagra when he speaks Sunday, Aug. 14 at an event in Brazil celebrating the International Year of Chemistry.
Leal will speak on “Making Sense of Scents: Reception of Pheromones and Other Semiochemicals in Moths, Mosquitoes and the Fruit Fly” at the São Paulo (Brazil) Advanced School on Chemistry of Natural Products, Medicinal Chemistry and Organic Synthesis.
The event is part of the yearlong celebrations of the International Year of Chemistry.
Leal collaborates on research with Nobel laureate Kurt Wüthrich, now of the Scripps Research Institute in California. Wüthrich won the Nobel in 2002.
Other Nobel laureates speaking are Ei-ichi Negishi, Purdue University, who won the Nobel in 2010; Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, Nobel winner in 2009; and Richard R. Schrock, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nobel winner in 2005.
Another invited speaker is Simon Campbell, formerly of the Pfizer Central Research UK. Campbell was a key member of the research team that discovered Viagra.
Leal, a native of Brazil, obtained his doctorate from Tsukuba University, Japan and is a postdoctoral Fellow through the National Institute of Sericultural and Entomological Science.. He served as guest editor of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; and is board member and editor of the Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE, board member of the Journal of Insect Physiology, Asia-Pacific Entomology, Neotropical Entomology and the Journal of Chemical Ecology. Leal obtained 28 Japanese and two U.S. patents and has published his work in 161 peer-reviewed journals.
Leal is facilitating a collaboration between UC Davis and the two major funding agencies in Brazil (CNPq and CAPES) for exchange of undergraduate and graduate students and scholars.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
