ITHACA, N.Y. -- Jack Freed, director of the National Biomedical Center for Advanced ESR Technology (ACERT) at Cornell University, will be honored at an international symposium in Baker Lab on April 26. The event will celebrate Freed's 65th birthday and his 40 years devoted to research and teaching at Cornell.

The symposium, "ESR, New Developments," will highlight new developments in electron spin resonance (ESR), with emphasis on its applications to biophysical and biomedical research.

Freed, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology, is internationally recognized as a pioneer in bringing to the forefront techniques for the study of molecular properties of ßuids and of biosystems, including the structure and complex dynamics of proteins and membranes. Many contemporary applications of ESR would not be possible without the theoretical and simulation methods developed by Freed and his research group. He became director of ACERT when it was established in 2001 with a grant of nearly $6 million from the National Institutes of Health.

Researchers from around the world will attend the symposium, and lectures will span a wide range of biophysical and related topics.

Freed, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1963, obtained his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1962. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and a John Simon Guggenheim fellow. Freed has received a number of awards including the APS Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics, the American Chemical Society's Buck-Whitney Award, the Bruker Award of the British Chemical Society and the International Zavoisky prize.

For further information, contact Heather Foringer at 255-4632 or hef8@cornell.edu.