Mariana Federica Wolfner will be our next guest on the Molecular and Cellular Biology Colloquium Series which is scheduled on 5th October 2021, Tuesday at 6pm PKST. This series is an initiative by the Department of Biology, and you can find all lecture details here.

This session will go LIVE via the SBASSE Facebook page. 

About the Speaker:

Mariana Federica Wolfner is Cornell’s Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Molecular Biology & Genetics, a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, and currently an Associate Department Chair. Her research focuses on understanding the molecular/genetic bases for important reproductive processes that occur around the time when a sperm fertilizes an egg. Using the Drosophila model, the Wolfner laboratory studies the molecular signals that "activate" an oocyte to initiate embryo development and also studies how seminal proteins modulate the reproductive physiology and behavior of female insects. Mariana received a B.A. in Biology and Chemistry from Cornell, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford, and did postdoctoral work at UC San Diego. She has mentored 43 graduate students, 30 postdoctoral scholars, and over 90 undergraduate or high school students in research. She has been honored to receive awards and recognition for her research from the Genetics Society of America, the Entomological Society of America, the International Congress of Entomology Council, and awards from Cornell for her teaching and advising/mentoring. Mariana is member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She serves on several Editorial and Biology-organizations’ Boards, and on various grants panels. 

Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS is pleased to announce the next talk of the "Best of Water Systems Research" seminar series. The talk will be delivered by Dr. Ariel Dinar of UC Riverside and is titled "Dealing with Water Scarcity and Salinity: Adoption of Water Efficient Technologies and Management Practices by California Avocado Growers". 

The talks are (mostly) delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at https://wit.lums.edu.pk/BWSR2021 which also includes recordings of past sessions and information on future speakers.

A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again.
 

The Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at SBASSE, LUMS is extremely excited to announce the launch of a webinar series intended to celebrate distinguished works in ‘Water Systems Research’. The seminars will be targeted towards researchers and technical experts working in water resource systems and will be delivered by scientists who have produced acclaimed research in the field. Securing the future of our water resources is becoming less of a problem of scarcity and more of a problem of effective management of what we already have. We strongly believe that this can be achieved only by adopting a systems perspective on water that takes into account the intricate linkages connecting the water system with food, energy, technology, and society. 'Best of Water Systems Research' is aimed at propagating the science and techniques of exactly this approach to sustain our water resources. In this series, WIT will be inviting top researchers who have applied systems theoretic methods to address real problems in water resource management.

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University on his work on participatory irrigation management in Punjab, Pakistan. Other confirmed speakers include Dr. Murugesu Sivapalan from UIUC, Dr. Ariel Dinar from UC Riverside, Dr. Grey Nearing from UC Davis, and Dr. Michael Mitchell from CSU Australia. Many other esteemed researchers are (and will be) invited and we are very excited to be able to learn collectively from their wealth of experiences. 

The talks will (mostly) be delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at here, while you can register here. The webinars will be streamed via zoom with the opportunity to interact with speakers during the Q&A after the presentation ends. A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again. 

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University and is titled: "Finding the next steps forward for IBIS water governance". The talk is scheduled for 6:00-7:00 pm PKT on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 and will be moderated by Dr. Talha Manzoor, Assistant Professor, Center for Water Informatics & Technology. 

About the speaker: Andrew Bell studies livelihoods and resource decision-making. including domains of irrigation, pest management, ecosystem services, technology adoption and migration. Most of his work applies survey and experimental tools (games, high-frequency smart-phone based surveys) to identify and model behaviour; and agent-based models to understand what these behaviours imply for system-level outcomes under scenarios of environmental change. He received his PhD (2010) in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE, now SEAS), also MASc in Environmental Engineering from Waseda University and BASc in Environmental Engineering from the University of Waterloo. 

For more details and queries, contact Soban Hameed Saigol from WIT at soban.hameed@lums.edu.pk.

Prof. Dr. Ellen Rothenberg is our distinguished guest for the upcoming session in Molecular and Cellular Biology Colloquium. She will be talking about “Gene Network and Epigenetic Mechanisms Controlling the Generation of T-Lymphocytes” on 24th June 2021 at 9am Pakistan time.

Professor Dr. Ellen Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.  She studies gene regulation and development of T lymphocytes, gene networks controlling hematopoietic cell fates, and mechanisms underlying the dynamics of single-cell developmental decisions. She received her bachelor's degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellowship at Sloan-Kettering Institute and an Assistant Research Professorship at The Salk Institute, she came to Caltech in 1982 and rose to become Albert Billings Ruddock Professor in 2007, then Distinguished Professor in 2021. She has been elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Member of the National Academy of Sciences. She was also selected for the inaugural class of Distinguished Fellows of the American Association of Immunologists. She won the Richard P. Feynman Prize for Excellence in Teaching and eight other teaching awards at Caltech, and has taught internationally on immunology, developmental biology, and gene regulatory networks. 

Prof. Dr. Shiv Grewal is our next guest speaker in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Colloquium series. He will be talking about “Epigenetic Genome Control by RNA-Based Mechanisms” on 26 May 2021 at 1700 hours PST via Zoom.

Prof. Dr. Shiv Grewal is NIH Distinguished Investigator and currently serving as the Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Head of the Chromosome Biology Section of the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. Shiv is a discoverer who has spent his life to understand how switching ON/OFF mechanism of genes operates in living cells and how once these ON/OFF states are stably inherited during our development. He is known for his groundbreaking work which has revealed how open and highly condensed conformation of chromatin is established, maintained and inherited. Three papers from Dr. Grewal’s laboratory are cited for historic discoveries over the past 50 years by Nature. Dr. Grewal is the recipient of the prestigious Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, NIH Merit Award, and the NIH Directors’ award. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Biography:

Shiv Grewal’s laboratory investigates conserved pathways involved in epigenetic genome control and assembly of heterochromatin, a specialized form of chromatin that impacts diverse cellular processes, including trans-generational inheritance of gene expression states, chromosome architecture, and the maintenance of genome stability. Grewal’s early work uncovered the paradigm of molecular signatures, such as distinct histone methylation patterns, which denote alternative chromatin states and are the foundation of epigenetic gene regulation essential for the translation of genetic information.  His work provided critical evidence for the histone code hypothesis by showing that methylation of histone H3 lysine 4 or 9 (H3K4me and H3K9me) define “open” and “closed” chromatin domains.  He discovered that heterochromatic structures can be epigenetically inherited in cis through mitosis and meiosis illustrating that the Mendelian unit of inheritance sometimes constitutes DNA plus associated protein complexes. 

He further revealed mechanisms that promote stable propagation of heterochromatin.  In particular, he defined two fundamental features,

1. the inherent property of heterochromatin to suppress histone turnover and
2. the ability of histone modifiers to both “write” and “read” methylated histones, which are critical for epigenetic inheritance of heterochromatin. 

Dr. Grewal’s and colleagues also discovered a highly conserved connection between RNAi and heterochromatin assembly that has revolutionized the current thinking on how complex genomes are assembled into higher-order chromatin structures.  This important contribution was selected as Breakthrough of the Year 2002 by Science magazine.  Three papers from Dr. Grewal’s laboratory are cited for historic discoveries over the past 50 years by Nature.  Dr. Grewal is the recipient of the prestigious Newcomb-Cleveland Prize, NIH Merit Award, and the NIH Directors’ award.  He is currently serving as the Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Head of the Chromosome Biology Section of the Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute.  He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign fellow of the Indian National Science Academy.

Dr. Yarjan Abdul Samad is a world-renowned Pakistani scientist at Cambridge who is pushing the boundaries of nanotechnology in space science. Originally from a small village in a remote area of Pakistan, he has set great examples for hard work and resilience to become a space scientist at Cambridge.

We are honoured to have him for a discussion seminar where he will talk about "Graphene-based Hybrids and Composites and their Applications". 

Dr. Abdul Samad Is a Senior Research Scientist and a Teaching Fellow at Cambridge Graphene Centre. He Is the first Space Scientist from Pakistan at the University of Cambridge. His research work is focused on space technologies. and he has won several awards for his work. He is mentoring numerous graduate students. He got his Bachelors degree from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute (GIKI) in Pakistan and Ph.D. from Khalif., University with research work done at top Institutions of Japan, USA and China. 

The topics he will cover are:

• Production of Graphene and related materials for Spacecrafts
• Development of graphene based composites, aerogels and coated electronic textiles
• Applications of manufactured graphene based components 

This event is scheduled for the following, please tune in according to your time zones:
Sunday, 2 May 2021 @ 12 noon US (CST), 6 pm UK, 8 pm Turkey/KSA, 10 pm Pakistan

To watch the seminar LIVE, please visit the links below: 
Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/SM-Nano
FB Live:  fb.me/STEMatters & fb.me/YPSoc

Professor Dr. Dirk Schubeler will be our next guest speaker in the Zooming Molecular and Cellular Biology Colloquium series. An expert in chromatin and gene regulation, he is one of the pioneers in using genome-wide approaches to uncover correlation of chromatin modifications with chromatin structure and function, and with processes of transcription and cell cycle. 

About the speaker:

Prof. Dr. Dirk Schubeler is Director of Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and Professor of Molecular Biology in University of Basel in Switzerland. An expert in chromatin and gene regulation, he is one of the pioneers in using genome-wide approaches to uncover correlation of chromatin modifications with chromatin structure and function, and with processes of transcription and cell cycle. Professor Schubeler received his PhD in 1995 from Technical University, Braunschweig, Germany. After finishing his postdoc at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, Dirk joined FMI in Basel as a junior group leader in 2003. He became senior group leader in 2008 and last year in 2020 he was appointed as Director of FMI. In 2021, he also became Professor of Molecular Biology at University of Basel. He is member of the EMBO and was Elected to Academia Europaea. He was awarded Friedrich Miescher Prize, Swiss Society for Biochemistry, VIVA Leading Scientist Award, ESCI Award for Excellence in Basic/Translational Research.

Professor Dr. Wendy Bickmore will be talking about “The role of spatial proximity in genome regulation”, in the next episode of Zooming Molecular and Cellular Biology. The session will be LIVE online via Zoom.  

Professor Dr. Wendy Bickmore is currently the Director of MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh. Prof. Bickmore is an authority on the three-dimensional organization of the human genome and how that influences genome function in health and disease. Her current research explores how the non-coding genome regulates gene expression. Wendy is a Fellow of; the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Academy of Medical Sciences and is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

About the speaker:

Wendy Bickmore is Director of the MRC Human Genetics Unit, at the University of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate degree is in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford and she then completed a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Edinburgh. Following a postdoc in human genetics, Wendy started her independent research group as a fellow of the Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine. She is fascinated by the three-dimensional organization of the human genome and how that influences genome function in health and disease. Her current research explores how the non-coding genome regulates gene expression. Wendy is a Fellow of; the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and of the Academy of Medical Sciences and is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Prof. Emanuele Delucchi has his research interests at the crossroads of combinatorics, topology and algebra, with a view on developing discrete structures for problems in pure and applied mathematics. He is also interested in mathematics education at all school levels. In this talk, he will highlight some combinatorial classification of finite metric spaces by means of a new polyhedral variant ‘fundamental polytopes’. 

For more details about his research and scholarly activities, visit his homepage: http://www.maestran.ch/math/.

More talks in the John Conway Spirited Seminar Series can be viewed here:      

https://sites.google.com/view/conway-spirited-math-seminars/home     

Professor Dr. Denis Duboule talks about “Hox gene regulation in embryos and pseudo-embryos” in Zooming Molecular and Cellular Biology.

He is one of the leading developmental biologists of present times who has notably worked on vertebrate Hox genes, a group of genes involved in the formation of the body plan and of the limbs. His work has shed light on how our limbs and digits (fingers) develop and what abnormalities arise when key Hox genes are misregulated. He will share some of exciting unpublished data.

About the speaker:

Professor Denis Duboule obtained his PhD from the University of Geneva in 1984. He moved to the University of Strasbourg for his post doc with Professor Pierre Chambon. In 1988, he became a group leader at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. In 1992, he received tenure at the University of Geneva where he is currently Professor of Developmental Genetics and Genomics at the EPFL and at the Department of Genetics and Evolution of the University of Geneva. Since 2001, he is the Director of the Swiss National Research Center "Frontiers in Genetics" and since 2017, he is a Professor at the Collège de France. He has notably worked on Hox genes, a group of genes involved in the formation of the body plan and of the limbs. In 2012, Professor Duboule was elected as the National Academy of Sciences as a foreign member. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society. He has received several awards including Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, Marcel Benoist Prize and A.O. Kovalevsky Medal (2013) from the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists.