SBASSE is pleased to invite Professor Dr. Robert Weinberg from MIT, USA for a seminar. He is Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and Member of MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. In his own words “Robert A. Weinberg studies how cancer spreads, what gives cancer stem-cells their unique qualities, and the molecular players involved in the formation of cancer stem cells and metastases”. He is one of the leaders in cancer biology in living times.

Zoom in with us LIVE for this major scientific event on Thursday 11th March 2021 at 7 pm PST

About the speaker:

Robert Weinberg received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from MIT. After post-doctoral studies in Israel and in California, he was recruited back to MIT, where he has been on the faculty of the Biology Department since 1974 and a member of the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research since 1982. His research is focused on the mechanisms of tumor formation and progression. Since 1985, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received several awards including the National Medal of Science, Wolf Foundation Prize, Salk Institute Medal for Research Excellence, and this year he was also awarded the Japan Prize by the Japan Foundation.

Learn more about Professor Dr. Robert Weinberg via this link: https://biology.mit.edu/profile/robert-a-weinberg/.

Prof. Hiten Madhani joins us for the next session of  Zooming Molecular and Cellular Biology Colloquium to talk about "Epigenetic Memory Over Geological Timescales". The session is taking place on Thursday 4th March 2021, 9pm San Francisco Time, which is Friday 5th March, 10am PST.  

Hiten investigates host pathogen interactions and innate immunity. He has also discovered epigenetic phenomenon in human pathogens like Candida albicans and Cryptococcus neoformans. Recently his laboratory has discovered evolutionary persistence of DNA methylation for millions of years in the absence of key machinery involved in setting up these covalent marks at DNA. Hiten has received several awards and distinctions and is a Fellow of American Academy of Microbiology as well as Fellow of American Association of the Advancement of Science.    

About the speaker:

Hiten Madhani was Born in London, U.K., grew up in Seattle, Washington, and attended Stanford University.  He received his MD and PhD degrees from UCSF and, after postdoctoral work at MIT/Whitehead Institute, returned to UCSF as faculty in 1999.  He is currently a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.  He was recently elected as a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science. 

Prof. Dr. Steve Henikof joins us LIVE to talk about “Genome-wide mapping of protein-DNA interaction dynamics” in Zooming Molecular & Cellular Biology Series. 

He is a faculty member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an affiliate professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. Steve is an authority and a highly accomplished scientist whose lifelong work revolves around understanding chromosome structure and dynamics and how they influence gene regulation. He has also contributed significantly to our understanding of centromeric chromatin structure and his lab has developed tools which we all use in our labs to investigate binding of proteins with DNA.

About the speaker:

Dr. Steve Henikoff studies chromosomes, chromatin dynamics and epigenetics and develops genomics and computational tools to facilitate this research. He received a BS from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Harvard University and did post-doctoral work at the University of Washington. He has been a faculty member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center since 1981. He is also an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, an affiliate professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and co-Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal Epigenetics & Chromatin.

Colloquium zooming Molecular & Cellular Biology

We went LIVE with Prof. Dr. Detlef Weigel on 25th November 2020 for our seminar on the topic of Epistasis, the spice of life: Lessons from the study of the plant immune system. Prof. Dr. Detlef Weigel is the executive director of the Max Planck Institute of Developmental Biology, Germany.

About the speaker:

Detlef Weigel, a German-American scientist, is currently Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Royal Society, and recipient of several scientific awards, most recently the Novozymes Prize of the Novo Nordisk Foundation.

The first major finding from his lab was that an Arabidopsis gene could dramatically accelerate flowering of trees; this established a proof of concept for Arabidopsis genetics as a platform for biotechnological discoveries. His group later discovered the first plant microRNA mutant and identified the factor that we now know to be the long sought-after mobile flower-inducing signal. Detlef was also one of the first to exploit natural genetic variation for understanding how the environment affects plant development. In recent years, this work has come to incorporate questions at the interface of evolution and ecology: How can wild plants adapt to climate change, and how do they manage to keep their pathogens at bay? In this research, he draws on the fruits of a collaborative effort initiated over a decade ago to sequence the genomes of over 1,000 natural A. thaliana strains (The 1001 Genomes Project).

Detlef has an extensive record of service to the scientific community, having served on a series of editorial and advisory boards. He is a forceful advocate of open access publishing and founding Deputy Editor of eLife. He is also a co-founder of three biotech startups.

Join us LIVE with Prof. Dr. Susan Wessler from University of California Riverside. Prof. Wessler talks about how transposons evade host defense in rice and increase their copy number without causing death of their hosts. Transposable elements, also known as jumping genes, are special class of genes that naturally exist in a silent state within genomes of every living organisms. They are a major threat to genome stability of a living organism and literally play a havoc with genome when they start jumping and lead to large scale mutations. Prof. Wessler shares about special class of transposons and how they amplify in rice. She is a highly accomplished plant biologist who is the recipient of several awards including the Stephen Hales Prize (2011) from the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Excellence in Science Award from FASEB (2012) and the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies (2015). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), the American Philosophical Society (2013), and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2017).

Biography:

Susan Wessler is Distinguished Professor of Genetics and the Neil and Rochelle Campbell Chair for innovation in Science Education at the University of California Riverside. In 2011 she was elected Home Secretary of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the first women to hold this position in its 150-year history. She is a plant molecular geneticist known for her contributions to the field of transposon biology and plant genome evolution. A native of New York City, she received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cornell University (1980) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1980-1982). She began her career at the University of Georgia in 1983 where she remained until moving to UC Riverside in 2010. 

Prof. Wessler has contributed extensively to educational and diversity initiatives.  As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor (2006), she adapted her research program for the classroom by developing the Dynamic Genome (DG) Course where incoming freshman can experience the excitement of scientific discovery. The DG course is currently taken by over 500 students / year.  As NAS Home Secretary, she has spearheaded initiatives that have led to a 40% increase in the number of women elected to membership in the NAS.

She is the recipient of several awards including the Stephen Hales Prize (2011) from the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Excellence in Science Award from FASEB (2012) and the McClintock Prize for Plant Genetics and Genome Studies (2015). She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1998), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), the American Philosophical Society (2013), and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (2017).

Prof. Dr. Susan Gasser gave a talk in our Colloquium “zooming Molecular & Cellular Biology” series. Prof. Gasser is a highly accomplished scientist who has contributed significantly to the fields of DNA replication, DNA damage repair and gene regulation. Having served FMI Switzerland for fourteen years as Director, Prof. Gasser is a member of the ETH Board, the Swiss Science Council, and sits on the scientific advisory board of the Helmholtz institutes of Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical chemistry, the Francis Crick Institute in London and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. At the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) she chaired the Equality Commission from 2014 to the end of 2019.

Susan Gasser studied biology and biophysics at the University of Chicago and received her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Basel. From 1986 she was group leader at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in Lausanne until 2001, when she was appointed full professor at the University of Geneva. From November 2004 until March 2019 she was Director of the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI), where she still heads her research group. Since 2005 she has also been a full professor for molecular biology at the University of Basel. Gasser is a member of the ETH Board, the Swiss Science Council, and sits on the scientific advisory board of the Helmholtz institutes of Germany, the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical chemistry, the Francis Crick Institute in London and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg. At the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) she chaired the Equality Commission from 2014 to the end of 2019.

Join us live with Prof. Greg Gibson from Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Center for Integrative Genomics (CIG). Prof. Gibson has helped bring the tools of genomic research to Drosophila (fruitfly) quantitative and evolutionary genetics. Since 2009 at Georgia Tech, his focus is human genomics with interests in predictive health, transcriptomics, and genotype-by-environment interactions in disease.

Biography:

Greg Gibson is Patton Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he directs the Center for Integrative Genomics (CIG). An Australian by birth, he attended the University of Sydney as an undergraduate, before pursuing his PhD in developmental genetics at the University of Basel in Switzerland. After Post-Doctoral training at Stanford University and Duke University, he was a David and Lucille Packard Fellow as an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan before moving to NC State University in North Carolina for 10 years. During that time, he helped bring the tools of genomic research to Drosophila (fruitfly) quantitative and evolutionary genetics. He moved to Georgia Tech in 2009 where he switched his focus to human genomics with interests in predictive health, transcriptomics, and genotype-by-environment interactions in disease. Dr Gibson has written two textbooks (Primers of Genome Science and of Human Genetics), and a trade book, It Takes a Genome.  He is a senior editor at Molecular Biology of Evolution, and maintains a monthly blog on genetics, Genome's Take.

Department of Biology initiated a Colloquium series “zooming Molecular and Cellular Biology” where scientists around the world working at the cutting edge are invited as guests. Our inaugural speaker was Dr. Oliver Bell from Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. 

Dr. Oliver Bell is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, and the Dept. of Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. His laboratory investigates the epigenetic mechanisms targeting chromatin modification to reinforce maintenance of gene expression states through genome replication. The Bell lab uses synthetic biology approaches, genetics and genomics to manipulate chromatin modifications and study their dynamics and inheritance. Ultimately, Dr. Bell’s research group aims to unravel the crosstalk between epigenetic regulation and cell plasticity.

Prof. Dr. Mitzi Kuroda from Harvard Medical School talks about the “Bivalent Polycomb Complexes of Master Switches of Developmental Gene Regulation” on Monday 1st February 2021 at 06:00 PM Pakistan time. This session takes place online via Zoom and will be webcasted via SBASSE’s Facebook page.

Kuroda laboratory is investigating role of chromatin bound protein complexes as well as related co-activators in embryonic stem cells and the aberrant properties of these proteins associated leukemia, with an ultimate goal to identify candidate factors and pathways for therapeutic intervention.

Mitzi Kuroda studied Biology at Tulane University in 1981. She did her PhD from Stanford University in 1987 followed by postdoc fellowship also from the Stanford in 1990. She joined Baylor College of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in 1990. Since 2003, she has been the Professor of Genetics and Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Kuroda lab analyzes potentially bivalent complexes of PRC1 with MOZ and related co-activators in ES cells and the aberrant properties of oncogenic MOZ and MLL in leukemia, the ultimate goal of identifying candidate factors and pathways for therapeutic intervention. From 2000-2004, she has been an elected member of the Board of Directors of Genetics Society of America. She has also been a member of the NIH Molecular Genetics B (MGB) Study Section. Prof. Kuroda has been awarded the NIH merit award and is also an elected member of National Academy of Sciences.