Dr. Roland Owens will be giving a talk for postdoctoral scholars and graduate students titled "What Does the NIH Look for in Tenure-Track Investigators?"

Dr. Roland A. Owens is Assistant Director of the NIH Office of Intramural Research and former Chief of the Molecular Biology Section in the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Biology in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at NIH. He received his bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1979, and his Ph.D. in biology from The Johns Hopkins University in 1985. His dissertation work involved studies of the export and protective effects of glutathione in bacteria. He began his career at the NIH as a National Research Service Award Fellow in the Laboratory of Developmental Pharmacology in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, studying Cytochrome P450 induction. In 1988 he received an Intramural Research Training Award Fellowship in the Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Biology in NIDDK. He became an independent researcher in 1992, was officially placed on the NIH intramural tenure-track in 1994 and was tenured in 1998. Dr. Owens' research focused on adeno-associated virus type-2, a virus that is being developed as a vehicle for human gene therapy to treat diabetes, and other diseases. His group's identification of the DNA sequence bound by the replication proteins of adeno-associated virus has led to the current models for integration and gene regulation mediated by these proteins. Dr. Owens is a co-inventor on two patents involving AAV gene therapy applications. He served on the editorial board of Journal of Virology from 1997 to 2002. He has been active in the mentoring of minority scientists and in 2002 was selected as Mentor of the Year by the UMBC Meyerhoff Scholarship Program. In 2008 he was named an Assistant Director of the NIH Office of Intramural Research. He received an NIH Director's Award in 2010 for his leadership role in the Earl Stadtman NIH-Wide Investigator Search.