Speakers
Dr. Chuan He
John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at The University of Chicago
Chuan He, Ph.D., is the John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry, Department of Biochemistry and Molecule Biology, and Director of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago. He is also a Cheung Kong Professor and Director of Synthetic Functional Biomolecules Center (SFBC) at Peking University in China. He was born in P. R. China in 1972 and received his B.S. (1994) from the University of Science and Technology of China. He received his Ph. D. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemistry in 2000 with Professor Stephen J. Lippard. After being trained as a Damon-Runyon postdoctoral fellow with Professor Gregory L. Verdine at Harvard University from 2000-2002, he joined the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 2008, full professor in 2010, and named John T. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor in 2014. He was selected as an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 2013. He’s research spans a broad range of chemical biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, epigenetics, cell biology, and genomics. His recent research concerns reversible RNA and DNA methylation in biological regulation. His laboratory made the original discovery of reversible RNA methylation in 2011. His subsequent work demonstrated that dynamic RNA chemical modification represents a new mechanism for gene expression regulation, thus initiating a new field of epitranscriptomics. He also invented widely utilized methods for mapping DNA epigenetic modifications. He’s laboratory is among one of the three groups that independently discovered N6-methyldeoxyadenosine as a functional DNA modification that regulates eukaryotic transcription. He is the director of the NIH National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS), Center for Dynamic RNA Epitranscriptomes.
Dr. David C Rubinsztein
University of Cambridge, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom
David Rubinsztein did a BSc(Med) Hons and PhD at the University of Cape Town after his basic medical training and housejobs. He came to Cambridge in 1993 as a senior registrar in Genetic Pathology. He is currently a UK Dementia Research Institute Professor, Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and Academic Lead of the Alzheimer’s Research UK Cambridge Drug Discovery Institute.
Rubinsztein has published more than 350 papers, which have an h index of 111 and >55,000 citations (Google Scholar), and was selected as a Thomson Reuters’ Highly Cited Researcher. He was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (2004), Professor of Molecular Neurogenetics (University of Cambridge, personal chair (2005)), as an EMBO member (2011) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (2017). He was awarded the Graham Bull Prize for Clinical Science (Royal College of Physicians, 2007) and the 2017 Thudichum Medal (Biochemical Society) for outstanding contributions to neuroscience.
Dr. Karsten Rippe
Head of the Division Chromatin Networks at the DKFZ and the Bioquant Center in Heidelberg and professor at the University of Heidelberg
Karsten Rippe is the Head of the Division Chromatin Networks at the DKFZ and the Bioquant Center in Heidelberg and professor at the University of Heidelberg. His group applies an interdisciplinary approach that combines biophysics, molecular/cell biology and medicine to quantitatively investigate and model the relation between the DNA organization in the nucleus into chromatin and the regulation of gene expression. Both in vitro and in vivo experiments are conducted using scanning/atomic force microscopy imaging, analytical ultracentrifugation and fluorescence spectroscopy/microscopy approaches to elucidate how chromatin assembly, conformation, dynamics and accessibility are controlled. Furthermore, various contributions to the modeling and quantitative analysis of the kinetics of chromatin assembly and the chromatin fiber organization have been made.
Dr. Stuart Firestein
Former Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences
Currently Visiting Fellow at Paris Science et Lettres (PSL)
Dr. Stuart Firestein is the former Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where his colleagues and he study the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. He performed his graduate studies at UC Berkeley in Neuroscience and was a Post Doctoral Fellow at Yale University where he became an Assistant Professor in 1992. Moving to Columbia in 1993 he established his laboratory devoted to understanding olfaction as a model system for brain studies. His laboratory published the first experimental evidence demonstrating that the recently cloned family of receptors expressed in olfactory sensory neurons were indeed odor receptors. He has published over 100 papers in scientific journals, including several highly cited reviews. His laboratory seeks to answer that fundamental human question: How do I smell?
Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science. He is on the SAB of the popular science magazine Nautilus, and on the Board of directors of the Imagine Science Film Festival. Recently he was awarded the 2011 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, an Alfred Sloan Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. At Columbia he is on the Advisory boards of the Center for Science and Society (CSS) and the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience –both centers for interdisciplinary work between the sciences and the humanities. He is the author of two books on the workings of science for a general audience: Ignorance, How it drives Science (OUP, 2012) and Failure: Why Science is So Successful, (2015). They have been translated into 10 languages.
