REPORT OF THE
COMMITTEE ON THE FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURE

To the Academic Senate, Santa Cruz Division:

The Committee on the Faculty Research Lecture is pleased to honor Professor David S. Kliger of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry as the Faculty Research Lecturer for the year 1999-2000.

Professor Kliger is well known to most members of the UCSC community for his teaching at all levels and remarkable record of service, which includes being Chair of his department, Chair of the Academic Senate, Chair of the Committee on Academic Personnel, and for all of the 1990s, Dean of the Division of Natural Sciences; but our focus here is entirely on his outstanding research accomplishments.

Professor Kliger received his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Rutgers University in 1965 and his PhD at Cornell University in 1970. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University in 1970-71 he pursued research on the pigments in the eye which make it possible for organisms to see and to have color vision.

He joined the UC Santa Cruz faculty as an assistant professor of Chemistry in 1971; he was tenured in 1977 and was promoted to professor in 1983. From the beginning of his research career at Santa Cruz he began to extend his studies of visual pigments through the use of a new technique: fast laser spectroscopy. This tool permitted analysis of the molecular changes taking place in visual pigments when they absorb light.

Kliger has developed at UCSC what is probably the best laboratory in the world for nanosecond laser spectroscopy of biological systems. What that means is that for anyone who wants to examine the chemical composition of biological systems by means of laser-illuminated snapshot glimpses with exposures as short as around a billionth of a second, the best place on this planet to make a start on it would probably be 120 Sinsheimer Laboratories at UCSC, thanks to the expertise that Kliger and his lab have built up on this campus.

Professor Kliger's work has expanded over the years from understanding the visual pigment rhodopsin to pioneering investigations of the rhodopsin of bacteria and plants, and of such biologically important molecules as hemoglobin (the red blood cell pigment), myoglobin (the reddish pigment of muscle), and cytochrome c (an enzyme that aids in the use of oxygen).

His career at the boundaries of physical chemistry and biophysics has been an unusual mix of developing new ultrasensitive physical techniques of analysis and applying them to gain an understanding of the chemical structure and function of protein molecules. The way proteins change their structure when they react to light and to other forces is one of the most active areas of study in science today. Professor Kliger is a leader in this new subfield, which tries to comprehend how living molecules work at their most basic level.

The significant research career that Professor Kliger has built at UCSC over the past quarter of a century and his important contributions to the advancement of biophysics is just a part of the revitalization of UCSC's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry that has been seen over the past and widely recognized chemists at the peak of their careers. This progress toward being yet one more of UCSC's world-class science departments has been consistently assisted and encouraged by Professor Kliger, who has facilitated and fostered not only his own science, on which he has published about 150 articles and three books, but that of his colleagues and of over forty graduate and postdoctoral students in his research group.

We are pleased to present to the Senate our unanimous recommendation that Professor Kliger should be the faculty member to give the Faculty Research Lecture lecture in the year 1999-2000.

May 12, 1999