16th Annual Riley O. Schaeffer Lecture

When: Fri, Nov 14 2025 4:00pm

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology is thrilled to welcome Dr. Paul Modrich of Duke University, and the only New Mexico born Nobel Prize winner, as our honored speaker for the 16th Annual Riley O. Schaeffer Endowed Lectureship. His lecture is titled "DNA Mismatch Repair in Human Cells: Mechamism and Some Functions".

This is the premier lecture held by the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and this year held in partnership with Research and Discovery Week, as one of the keynote lectures. This lectureship was established in 2008 in honor of Professor Riley Schaeffer through the contributions from UNM faculty, past students of Professor Shaeffer at Indiana University and UNM, friends, and external colleagues.

We regret to announce that the 2025 Riley O. Schaeffer Endowed Lectureship with guest speaker, Dr. Paul Modrich, Friday, November 14, has been postponed. Due to unexpected circumstances, Dr. Modrich is unable to join us at this time, but we are working to reschedule his lecture for next year. 

About the Speaker

Paul Modrich grew up in Raton, New Mexico.  He received his B.S. degree in Biology from M.I.T. in 1968 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry in 1973 from Stanford University, where he studied DNA ligase in the laboratory of I. Robert Lehman.  After postdoctoral work on DNA replication with Charles C. Richardson at Harvard Medical School, Paul moved to UC Berkeley as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry in 1974.  He joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry at Duke in 1976, where he is currently James B. Duke Professor Emeritus.  He was an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1994-2019.

Paul Modrich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and recipient of several awards including the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry, the General Motors Mott Prize in Cancer Research, the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he shared with Tomas Lindahl and Aziz Sancar.

The primary focus of Paul’s research program has been the mechanisms and functions of strand-directed DNA mismatch repair.  This pathway corrects base-pairing errors in the DNA helix and is well known for stabilizing the genome via rectification of errors that occur during chromosome replication.  His laboratory established basic mechanistic features of mismatch repair in both E. coli and human cells and demonstrated that the pathway is defective in tumor cells with microsatellite instability, including those from patients with Lynch syndrome, the most common form of hereditary colon cancer.  His more recent interest has been involvement of the human repair system in the expansion of triplet repeat sequences, the primary cause of more than a dozen neurodegenerative diseases.

Link: More about the Riley O. Schaeffer Endowed Lectureship