Professor Squire Booker
Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology
Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science
The Pennsylvania State University
Mentoring Matters: An Unexpected Journey Launched in Southeast Texas
The percentage of underrepresented professors of color in STEM disciplines, particularly African Americans, remains abysmally low. This lecture will focus on my career trajectory from growing up in Beaumont, TX, to becoming the first Black professor in the chemistry department at The Pennsylvania State University. I will discuss how mentoring and seizing opportunities were crucial to my success. Moreover, I will discuss diversity-related work, how metals, radicals, and enzymes shaped my love for science, and how new initiatives are leading to positive changes in hiring diverse STEM faculty and mentoring the next generation.
Squire Booker
Professor Squire J. Booker is an Evan Pugh Professor of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, and the Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science at Pennsylvania State University. He is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received a B.A. degree in chemistry from Austin College in 1987 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994, where he was supervised by Prof. JoAnne Stubbe. He received and NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellowship to study at the Université René Descartes in Paris, France under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Mansuy, and then an NIH postdoctoral fellowship to study at the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin under the supervision of Prof. Perry Frey. He joined the faculty at Penn State in 1999, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005, Professor in 2013, Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science in 2017, and Evan Pugh Professor in 2018. Booker’s research focuses on the enzymology of natural product biosynthesis, with a particular interest in the methylation or sulfidation of unactivated carbon centers, and the use of S-adenosylmethionine and iron-sulfur clusters in enzyme catalysis.
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