Scientist Morimoto Named to Argonne Board

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Richard Morimoto, the Bill and Gayle Cook Professor in Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Cell Biology at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been named by UChicago Argonne LLC to its Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory.

Morimoto joins Northwestern's President Henry S. Bienen and Vice President for Research C. Bradley Moore on the board. Moore also serves on the Science Policy Council.

UChicago Argonne LLC manages Argonne for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science; its board members help oversee and guide Argonne research, operations and management. Members of the board are chosen from faculty, administrators and trustees of The University of Chicago, from other universities, from national and international organizations and from industry.

Morimoto is director of Northwestern's Rice Institute for Biomedical Research and is the University's liaison to the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, a collaboration of Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is widely recognized for his research on the regulation of the heat shock stress response and the function of molecular chaperones. Morimoto's current research studies provide a molecular basis to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, ALS and Alzheimer's disease.

Morimoto served as dean of the Graduate School and associate provost of graduate education at Northwestern from 1998 to 2004 and previously as chair of the department of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 1982.

He is currently on the National Institute for General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) advisory board and is actively involved with assessment of minority training programs. Morimoto has served on numerous editorial boards, the National Institutes of Health's molecular biology study section, the NIGMS molecular and cellular basis of disease panel, the AAAS scientific program committee and the Beckman Scholars advisory panel.

The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts basic and applied scientific research across a spectrum of disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to biotechnology.

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