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UW-River Falls Alumna Named Chair of Nobel Prize Committee

Dec. 6, 2012— Juleen Zierath, a 1984 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, has been elected chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. She is the first female chair of the committee.  

Zierath is a Milwaukee native and holds both Swedish and American citizenship. She is a professor of Clinical Integrative Physiology at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research is focused on metabolism and diabetes, and she works at the Departments of Molecular Medicine and Surgery, as well as Physiology and Pharmacology. 

Zierath maintains close ties to UW-River Falls. She served as the UWRF commencement speaker in May 2011, when she was named the UW-River Falls Distinguished Alumnus. During the past two summers, student researchers from the UW-River Falls Tissue and Cellular Innovation Center traveled to work with Zierath at Karolinska Institutet. The resulting research will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in in February 2013. 

The Nobel Prize is the most prestigious award of its kind. Hundreds of nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are received each year from researchers all over the world. The Nobel Committee investigates and evaluates all of the candidates and presents its proposal for the award to the Nobel Assembly. 

For more information, visit www.nobelprizemedicine.org, or contact Blake Fry, UWRF special assistant to the chancellor at 715-425-3771 or blake.fry@uwrf.edu.

Juleen

Photo: Juleen Ziertah (center) with UW-River Falls students Kathryn Overby and Kevin Rixmann. During the past two summers UW-River Falls students have traveled to the Stockholm, Sweden, to work with Ziertah at Karolinska Institutet. Zierath was recently named chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine.

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