Nobel Prize winner Joachim Frank, former UAlbany professor, poet, fiction writer
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 6, in the Huxley Theatre, NYS Museum, Cultural Education Center, in the Empire State Plaza, 222 Madison Avenue, Albany.

Nobel Prize winner Joachim Frank, former UAlbany professor, poet, fiction writer will host a conversation about life in the arts and sciences at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 6, in the Huxley Theatre, NYS Museum, Cultural Education Center, in the Empire State Plaza, 222 Madison Avenue, Albany.

Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m., Frank will be guest speaker for a discussion/Q&A in the D'Ambra Auditorium, Life Sciences Research Building on the University at Albany’s Uptown Campus.

Both events, free and open to the public, are cosponsored by the NYS Writers Institute, UAlbany’s Life Sciences Research Initiative, the RNA Institute, the State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education, Friends of the New York State Library, and the UAlbany Emeritus Center.

Frank, founder of the field of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson for developing a technique to image biomolecules. Currently on faculty at Columbia University, Frank lived and worked in the Capital Region for more than three decades. Alongside his scientific pursuits, Dr. Frank has maintained a lifelong devotion to the art of creative writing. A published poet and fiction writer, he has taken classes with William Kennedy, Steven Millhauser, Eugene Garber, and Jayne Anne Phillips. Much of his literary work appears on his website, www.franxfiction.com.

In a Wall Street Journal story published shortly after the Nobel Prize announced, A Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist’s Literary Ambitions, Frank shows his abiding love for the writing: “While he sees his Nobel as a crowning achievement in his day job, he also hopes it will help bring more attention to his other career, as a fiction writer. Dr. Frank is the author of three unpublished novels and dozens of short stories. He has been writing almost as long as he has been teaching and researching chemistry.”

Frank is also a photographer who has had a number of exhibitions. During an interview with Adam Smith, Chief Scientific Officer of Nobel Media, Frank explains his fascination for photography, "I’m just very visually oriented. So I see patterns, I see structures very, very fast in a background and so forth. So I have a view when I walk around, sometimes I take pictures."

Frank received notification of his Nobel Prize by phone. In the New York Times story announcing the award, "[Frank] received his phone call at 5:18 a.m. New York time. He said recently his dog has been barking earlier and earlier in the morning, waking up him and his wife. 'This time it was not the dog,' he said."